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Amarante do Maranhão fire, 19 September 2017 Amarante do Maranhão

Out · last detection 6 Oct 2017, 17:16 UTC

The fire started on 19 September 2017 in Amarante do Maranhão, Brazil, and satellites saw it burning for 18 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,915 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 167th largest in Maranhão since 2016 (of 607 with a page). Number 361 in Brazil in 2017, of 994.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Montes Altos · 2020Montes Altos · 2017Montes Altos · 2017Amarante do Maranhão · 2020

Burnt area
5,915ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
18days
19 Sept 2017 – 6 Oct 2017
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
19 Sept
2017
Heat detections
259
in a single hotspot: 57 MW
Danger at start
43
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
155MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 19 Sept6 Oct
6 Oct 2017

How it evolved, day by day

19 Sept 2017 · 143 MW · 11 20 Sept 2017 · 117 MW · 14 21 Sept 2017 · 224 MW · 29 22 Sept 2017 · 466 MW · 46 23 Sept 2017 · 267 MW · 29 24 Sept 2017 · 24 MW · 7 25 Sept 2017 · 27 MW · 7 26 Sept 2017 · 143 MW · 20 27 Sept 2017 · 381 MW · 37 28 Sept 2017 · 209 MW · 22 30 Sept 2017 · 30 MW · 6 1 Oct 2017 · 65 MW · 26 2 Oct 2017 · 24 MW · 4 6 Oct 2017 · 52 MW · 1
19 Sept 21 Sept 22 Sept 23 Sept 25 Sept 27 Sept 30 Sept 2 Oct

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

37°high
51km/h · peak gust
28%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.4 mm on 16 Oct.

This area had burned before

13% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 750 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 3.7% of the area of London (59 km² against 1,583 km²).

London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).

This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.

What happened to each town

  1. Amarante do Maranhão 37,085 inhabitants where it started
    5,958 ha reached on 19 Sept
    0.8 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance runs from the point marking the centre of each area to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2015
Built-up area0.11 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.11 hectares of built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2015, satellite-based estimate).

This is an estimate on 100 m cells, made from satellite imagery and census data: it does not mean that homes burned or that anyone was harmed. The perimeter also contains land that never burned.

Source: Global Human Settlement Layer (GHS-BUILT-S and GHS-POP R2023A), European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), © European Union, CC BY 4.0. Sum inside the perimeter computed by WorldFires. human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu

The weather day by day

ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, the standard reference for past weather, and the Canadian Fire Weather Index (the same system Copernicus uses), computed by WorldFires from that data. Days after the fire run until the first rain.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
19 Sept 36.8 °C 30 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
20 Sept 36.1 °C 34 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
21 Sept 36.0 °C 31 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
22 Sept 35.8 °C 28 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
23 Sept 35.7 °C 31 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
24 Sept 35.7 °C 30 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
25 Sept 34.0 °C 37 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
26 Sept 36.8 °C 31 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
27 Sept 36.3 °C 32 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
28 Sept 36.6 °C 30 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
29 Sept 37.4 °C 30 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
30 Sept 34.9 °C 37 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
1 Oct 35.6 °C 33 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
2 Oct 35.6 °C 38 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
3 Oct 36.2 °C 40 % 35 km/h 0.1 mm High 35
4 Oct 36.6 °C 34 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
5 Oct 36.5 °C 32 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
6 Oct 36.8 °C 31 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
7 Oct after 35.3 °C 32 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
8 Oct after 34.9 °C 37 % 36 km/h 0.2 mm High 36
9 Oct after 33.6 °C 46 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
10 Oct after 33.2 °C 45 % 37 km/h 0.2 mm High 30
11 Oct after 34.0 °C 46 % 41 km/h 0.1 mm High 31
12 Oct after 34.5 °C 47 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
13 Oct after 34.8 °C 48 % 39 km/h 0.2 mm High 29
14 Oct after 35.1 °C 43 % 38 km/h 0.1 mm High 30
15 Oct after 33.5 °C 47 % 35 km/h 0.2 mm High 30
16 Oct after 32.3 °C 56 % 31 km/h 1.4 mm Moderate 15

Before and after, from space

Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.

Before · 12 Sept 2017
After · 13 Oct 2017

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

Detections table · 259Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
⬇ Download CSV Times in UTC. Each detection is a 375 m pixel: a large fire yields hundreds per pass.
Date and timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Brazil ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Amarante do Maranhão fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 19 September 2017 to 6 October 2017 (18 days). The perimeter dates it from 19 September 2017 to 2 October 2017.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 5,915 hectares (59.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Amarante do Maranhão (5,958 ha, 0.8 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 37.4 °C, humidity dropped to 28 % and gusts hit 51 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 48, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Brazil (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

Where to verify it

A satellite detection is not an official report. Final figures and the fire’s status are published by each country’s emergency service.

Emergency number: 193 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

Satellite cross-check

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 2 October 2017 → 6 October 2017.

RSS Changes to this page

Does something look wrong on this page?

This page is built from satellite data and official records, and it sometimes gets things wrong: the wrong dates, the wrong town, two fires merged into one, or something that was not a wildfire at all. If you know this fire first-hand (you live nearby, saw it, fought it or reported on it), tell us what really happened and we will check it.

Report an error
What do you think is wrong?

We will only use your email to reply about this report. Privacy. This is not an emergency service: if there is a fire now, call 193.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
  • Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 19 September 2017 to 2 October 2017. 259 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.
  • Weather: Copernicus ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, in cells of about 25 km.
  • Built-up area and population come from the JRC Global Human Settlement Layer (epoch 2015, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.

How we build fire pages: methodology ›

Where this data comes from

The perimeter comes from the Copernicus Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), which rebuilds it from MODIS and VIIRS heat detections and publishes it under CC BY 4.0. It is not measured on imagery as in Europe, so it is an estimate. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. Municipal boundaries come from geoBoundaries ADM2 (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY 3.0 IGO)). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ from each country’s official figure.