How long did the Apiacás fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 23 August 2022 to 12 September 2022 (21 days). The perimeter dates it from 30 August 2022 to 12 September 2022.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 3,286 hectares (32.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Apiacás (3,313 ha, 0.2 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 35.7 °C, humidity dropped to 23 % and gusts hit 36 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 43, 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.

BR · Brazil · 2022-08-23 → 2022-09-12

Apiacás fire, 23 August 2022 Apiacás

Out · last detection 12 Sept 2022, 04:53 UTC

The fire started on 23 August 2022 in Apiacás, Brazil, and satellites saw it burning for 21 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 3,286 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1789th largest in Mato Grosso since 2016 (of 1996 with a page). Number 595 in Brazil in 2022, of 687.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Apiacás · 2020 Apiacás · 2024 Paranaíta · 2024 Paranaíta · 2020

Burnt area: 3,286ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 21days; 23 Aug 2022 – 12 Sept 2022
Municipalities hit: 1; municipalities
Started on: 23 Aug; 2022
Heat detections: 168; in a single hotspot: 246 MW
Danger at start: 37; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 121MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 23 Aug12 Sept

Play back 12 Sept 2022

How it evolved, day by day

23 Aug 30 Aug 1 Sept 2 Sept 5 Sept 8 Sept 11 Sept

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

The weather it burned in

36°high

36km/h · peak gust

23%lowest humidity

It had gone 13 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 17.8 mm on 18 Sept.

This area had burned before

78% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,147 ha in 2019, 1,490 ha in 2020, 824 ha in 2021. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 2,575 ha that had burned before.

292 ha Apiacás fire, August 2020 17,152 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 2.1% of the area of London (33 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

Apiacás 8,590 inhabitants where it started

3,313 ha reached on 23 Aug

0.2 %

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 2020

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2020, 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)
23 Aug	33.5 °C	27 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
24 Aug	34.5 °C	30 %	25 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
25 Aug	32.5 °C	39 %	20 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
26 Aug	34.4 °C	40 %	19 km/h	0.1 mm	High 30
27 Aug	34.0 °C	41 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
28 Aug	34.2 °C	39 %	19 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
29 Aug	35.6 °C	24 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
30 Aug	35.1 °C	28 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
31 Aug	35.4 °C	27 %	21 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
1 Sept	35.0 °C	28 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
2 Sept	35.7 °C	23 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
3 Sept	35.2 °C	24 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
4 Sept	35.1 °C	26 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
5 Sept	35.7 °C	29 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
6 Sept	32.8 °C	47 %	22 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
7 Sept	34.1 °C	40 %	25 km/h	0.2 mm	High 28
8 Sept	33.5 °C	48 %	26 km/h	0.3 mm	High 26
9 Sept	33.8 °C	48 %	27 km/h	0.1 mm	High 26
10 Sept	34.1 °C	39 %	19 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
11 Sept	35.3 °C	37 %	21 km/h	0.0 mm	High 29
12 Sept	34.0 °C	41 %	19 km/h	0.2 mm	High 28
13 Sept after	31.9 °C	53 %	22 km/h	0.3 mm	High 24
14 Sept after	35.3 °C	39 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
15 Sept after	33.1 °C	49 %	23 km/h	0.1 mm	High 26
16 Sept after	34.3 °C	44 %	28 km/h	0.5 mm	High 26
17 Sept after	34.8 °C	43 %	20 km/h	0.4 mm	High 26
18 Sept after	27.7 °C	80 %	26 km/h	17.8 mm	Very low 0

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 16 Aug 2022

After · 19 Sept 2022

Before After

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

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 1 September 2022 the air beside the fire reached 260 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 172: 11 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak260 µg/m³

Days over the guideline19 days

PM10371 µg/m³

Optical depth2.23

WHO 15

28293031123456789101112131415

Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

Particles from the Copernicus CAMS model at the centre of the perimeter; these are not measurements in each town. The pale bar is the worst hour, the solid one the daily average.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)

Detections table · 168Every 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 time	Satellite	FRP (MW)	Lat	Lon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Brazil ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Apiacás fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 23 August 2022 to 12 September 2022 (21 days). The perimeter dates it from 30 August 2022 to 12 September 2022.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 3,286 hectares (32.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Apiacás (3,313 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 35.7 °C, humidity dropped to 23 % and gusts hit 36 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 43, 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 ›

INPE · Programa Queimadas ↗
IBAMA · Prevfogo ↗

Satellite cross-check

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

25 October 2026 Start date: 30 August 2022 → 23 August 2022.

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?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

What really happened?

Your connection to the fire (optional) Email (optional)

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 30 August 2022 to 12 September 2022. 168 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 2020, 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.

Where it burned