Aripuanã fire, 13 August 2025 Aripuanã
The fire started on 13 August 2025 in Aripuanã, Brazil, and satellites saw it burning for 17 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 4,092 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 1380th largest in Mato Grosso since 2016 (of 1996 with a page). Number 457 in Brazil in 2025, of 714.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 4,092ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 17days
- 13 Aug 2025 – 29 Aug 2025
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- municipalities
- Started on
- 13 Aug
- 2025
- Heat detections
- 532
- in a single hotspot: 202 MW
- Danger at start
- 31
- High · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 393MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
It had gone 49 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.1 mm on 31 Aug.
This area had burned before
26% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 275 ha in 2021, 175 ha in 2022, 559 ha in 2023, 1,022 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,081 ha that had burned before.
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
4,111 ha reached on 13 Aug0.2 %
Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance is from the town centre to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.
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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 13 Aug | 35.0 °C | 30 % | 23 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 31 |
| 14 Aug | 35.3 °C | 24 % | 33 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 38 |
| 15 Aug | 35.2 °C | 20 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 38 |
| 16 Aug | 35.0 °C | 34 % | 21 km/h | 0.1 mm | High 34 |
| 17 Aug | 34.4 °C | 42 % | 23 km/h | 1.9 mm | Moderate 16 |
| 18 Aug | 34.4 °C | 42 % | 27 km/h | 0.3 mm | High 23 |
| 19 Aug | 33.6 °C | 49 % | 27 km/h | 0.3 mm | High 23 |
| 20 Aug | 33.7 °C | 45 % | 22 km/h | 0.5 mm | High 23 |
| 21 Aug | 35.4 °C | 38 % | 26 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 27 |
| 22 Aug | 35.3 °C | 30 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 34 |
| 23 Aug | 35.9 °C | 31 % | 20 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 32 |
| 24 Aug | 36.2 °C | 26 % | 26 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 37 |
| 25 Aug | 33.2 °C | 37 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 36 |
| 26 Aug | 34.1 °C | 35 % | 32 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 34 |
| 27 Aug | 34.8 °C | 33 % | 26 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 33 |
| 28 Aug | 34.1 °C | 39 % | 19 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 30 |
| 29 Aug | 35.9 °C | 36 % | 17 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 30 |
| 30 Aug after | 35.4 °C | 40 % | 24 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 31 |
| 31 Aug after | 34.5 °C | 46 % | 32 km/h | 2.1 mm | Moderate 12 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
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 · CopernicusOn 16 August 2025 the air beside the fire reached 204 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 126: 8.4 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
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 · 532Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Aripuanã fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 13 August 2025 and 29 August 2025: 17 days between the first and last heat detection of the perimeter.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 4,092 hectares (40.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Aripuanã (4,111 ha, 0.2 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 36.2 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 34 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 38, 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
Satellite cross-check
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
How we know this
- Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
- Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 532 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.
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.