Burned area
satellite only7,065ha
Perimeter published by GWIS (Copernicus).
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus)
- Date
- 31 Oct 2026 – 14 Nov 2026
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page to compare it with.
BR · Brazil · –
Barão de Melgaço fire, October 2026 Barão de Melgaço, Poconé
Burning · last detection 14 Nov 2026, 17:26 UTC
The fire started on 31 October 2026 in Barão de Melgaço, Brazil, and satellites saw it burning for 15 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 7,065 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.
Number 209 in Brazil in 2026, of 797.
GWIS near-real-time perimeter, from the layer that changed in October 2025: this fire is not compared with fires from earlier years, because since then the GWIS layer gives more and larger perimeters.
Use this data
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Fire page data · version 2026-11-14matches the official recordwith caveatssatellite onlymodel
When copying, the sentence is
Tick the figures you want: they make up the lede and the CSV.
Duration by satellite
satellite only15days
From 31 Oct 2026 to today: still being detected.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- last detection: 14 Nov 2026, 17:26 UTC
+− cross-check
Satellites pass a few times a day and cloud or smoke can hide the fire: a lack of detections is not an official extinction. Each country’s emergency service declares a fire contained or out.
Start
satellite only31 Oct 2026
First day with fire seen by the satellites or the perimeter.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- 31 Oct 2026
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page, so the alert time and the cause are not known here.
Hotspots
satellite only257
VIIRS detections at 375 m. Most intense hotspot: 51 MW.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (Suomi NPP + NOAA-20)
- Date
- 31 Oct 2026 – 14 Nov 2026
+− cross-check
There is no official record to compare with. Each hotspot is a pixel detected in one satellite pass, not a separate fire.
The worst day
satellite only390MW
Total radiative power on 3 November 2026; hotspots that day: 68.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (FRP)
- Date
- 3 Nov 2026
+− cross-check
Fire radiative power (FRP) measures the energy the fire gives off when the satellite passes. Added up by day, it compares intensity, not area.
Danger at the start
model0.8FWI · very low
Fire Weather Index (Canadian system) computed by WorldFires for the day the fire started. Consecutive days without rain before: 1.
- Source
- WorldFires calculation (Canadian FWI system)
- Date
- 31 Oct 2026, local noon
- Model
- ECMWF IFS 0,25° · Open-Meteo.com · provisional
+− cross-check
This is an index computed from weather model data, not a measurement of the fire nor an official warning. Danger warnings are issued by each country’s authority. Emergency number and official warnings
Weather during the fire
model37.8°C · 36% RH
High of 37.8 °C and minimum humidity of 36% on 7 November 2026; gusts of 47 km/h on 8 November 2026.
- Source
- weather model at the fire’s grid cell
- Date
- 31 Oct 2026 – 14 Nov 2026
- Model
- ECMWF IFS 0,25° · Open-Meteo.com · provisional
+− cross-check
These are model values for a cell of about 25 km, not from a weather station: they may differ from what was measured on the ground.
This page’s change log has been kept since 5 November 2026: every night what it publishes is compared and the difference is logged. Anything earlier is reconstructed from each source’s date and marked as reconstructed.
Show
-
logArea: 6,566 → 7,065 ha.
-
· reconstructed weatherWeather and FWI computed from the forecast (provisional until ERA5 arrives)
-
logArea: 6,298 → 6,566 ha.
-
· reconstructed GHSLPopulation and built-up area computed
-
logArea: 6,026 → 6,298 ha.
-
logArea: 5,726 → 6,026 ha.
-
logArea: 5,054 → 5,726 ha.
-
logPage published (5,054 ha).
Area logged each night
Move the slider to see which area the page published each day.
Versioned permanent link
https://worldfires.org/en/fire/barao-de-melgaco-2026-10?v=2026-11-14A version keeps the area, dates, name and official record; the area as it was logged (changes under 2% are not logged). The map, hotspots and weather always show today’s data.
Citation
A lede of about 60 words figures only, no adjectives
CSV for this fire barao-de-melgaco-2026-10.csv · daily, no individual hotspots
| fecha | focos_viirs | frp_mw | tmax_c | tmin_c | hr_min_pct | viento_max_kmh | racha_max_kmh | precip_mm | fwi | clase_fwi | dentro_del_incendio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-31 | 0 | 0 | 33 | 23 | 67 | 10.8 | 27.7 | 8.1 | 0.8 | muy_bajo | 1 |
| 2026-11-01 | 0 | 0 | 35.1 | 23.5 | 44 | 12.2 | 30.2 | 0.6 | 5.9 | bajo | 1 |
| 2026-11-02 | 21 | 196 | 36.8 | 24.9 | 38 | 16.6 | 39.2 | 0 | 20.5 | moderado | 1 |
| 2026-11-03 | 68 | 390 | 37.4 | 25.5 | 40 | 15.4 | 29.9 | 0.5 | 18.2 | moderado | 1 |
| 2026-11-04 | 56 | 390 | 36.4 | 25.8 | 38 | 18.1 | 42.8 | 0 | 24.7 | alto | 1 |
| 2026-11-05 | 22 | 87 | 37.1 | 26 | 38 | 16.1 | 39.6 | 0 | 25.6 | alto | 1 |
| 2026-11-06 | 40 | 351 | 37.1 | 25.2 | 39 | 12.7 | 32 | 0.1 | 24 | alto | 1 |
| 2026-11-07 | 15 | 242 | 37.8 | 26.6 | 36 | 13 | 33.5 | 0.1 | 26.1 | alto | 1 |
| 2026-11-08 | 0 | 0 | 28.8 | 21.8 | 72 | 18.6 | 46.8 | 5.6 | 3.3 | muy_bajo | 1 |
| 2026-11-09 | 2 | 20 | 30.7 | 20.8 | 51 | 10.5 | 25.2 | 0 | 6.5 | bajo | 1 |
| 2026-11-10 | 9 | 79 | 35 | 22.5 | 42 | 8.1 | 17.6 | 0 | 14.1 | moderado | 1 |
| 2026-11-11 | 7 | 13 | 33.6 | 24.2 | 55 | 16.9 | 35.3 | 4.1 | 11.1 | bajo | 1 |
| 2026-11-12 | 17 | 129 | 33.8 | 22.9 | 55 | 11.7 | 29.2 | 4.2 | 4.7 | muy_bajo | 1 |
| 2026-11-13 | 0 | 0 | 34.6 | 23.7 | 48 | 12.7 | 31 | 0.9 | 7.2 | bajo | 1 |
| 2026-11-14 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
It is generated in your browser from this page’s data: one file per fire, aggregated by day and without individual hotspots.
Live widget for your story
It updates itself while the fire is still active and links to this page. Free, with the attribution shown at the bottom.
Sources for this page: GWIS (Copernicus), NASA FIRMS (VIIRS), ECMWF IFS · Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0), GHSL (JRC). Open-Meteo.com · How we build fire pages: methodology
Is it still active?
Satellites detected fire on 14 Nov 2026, 17:26 UTC. Everything suggests it is still burning. Satellites pass a few times a day and cloud or smoke can hide the fire: a lack of detections is not an official extinction. Each country’s emergency service declares a fire contained or out.
- Burnt area
- 7,065ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 15days
- 31 Oct 2026 – 14 Nov 2026
- Municipalities hit
- 2
- municipalities
- Started on
- 31 Oct
- 2026
- Heat detections
- 257
- in a single hotspot: 51 MW
- Danger at start
- 1
- Very low · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 190MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
HOTSPOTS BY DAY
31 Oct14 Nov
14 Nov 2026
How it evolved, day by day
31 Oct
3 Nov
6 Nov
10 Nov
13 Nov
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
38°high
47km/h · peak gust
36%lowest humidity
It had gone one day without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.
This area had burned before
72% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,259 ha in 2016, 2,644 ha in 2017, 966 ha in 2018, 3,193 ha in 2019, 4,916 ha in 2020, 1,875 ha in 2021, 1,718 ha in 2022, 4,083 ha in 2023, 1,531 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 5,054 ha that had burned before.
- 4,916 ha Barão de Melgaço fire, July 2020 796,044 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 4,083 ha Barão de Melgaço fire, October 2023 462,913 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 2,837 ha Barão de Melgaço fire, October 2019 4,226 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 2,644 ha Barão de Melgaço fire, September 2017 3,498 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 1,875 ha Barão de Melgaço fire, September 2021 5,780 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 1,314 ha Barão de Melgaço fire, September 2022 3,006 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 1,206 ha Barão de Melgaço fire, October 2024 3,708 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 325 ha Barão de Melgaço fire, August 2024 128,779 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
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
-
7,020 ha reached on 31 Oct0.6 %
-
Poconé 31,217 inhabitants95 ha reached on 2 Nov0.0 %
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 2025Built-up area0.13 ha
Residents< 20
Inside the perimeter there were about 0.13 hectares of built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2025, 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. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.
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) · forecast models, provisional until the ERA5 reanalysis arrives
| Day | High | Min. humidity | Peak gust | Rain | Danger (FWI) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 31 Oct | 33.0 °C | 67 % | 28 km/h | 8.1 mm | Very low 1 |
| 1 Nov | 35.1 °C | 44 % | 30 km/h | 0.6 mm | Low 6 |
| 2 Nov | 36.8 °C | 38 % | 39 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 20 |
| 3 Nov | 37.4 °C | 40 % | 30 km/h | 0.5 mm | Moderate 18 |
| 4 Nov | 36.4 °C | 38 % | 43 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 25 |
| 5 Nov | 37.1 °C | 38 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 26 |
| 6 Nov | 37.1 °C | 39 % | 32 km/h | 0.1 mm | High 24 |
| 7 Nov | 37.8 °C | 36 % | 34 km/h | 0.1 mm | High 26 |
| 8 Nov | 28.8 °C | 72 % | 47 km/h | 5.6 mm | Very low 3 |
| 9 Nov | 30.7 °C | 51 % | 25 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 6 |
| 10 Nov | 35.0 °C | 42 % | 18 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 14 |
| 11 Nov | 33.6 °C | 55 % | 35 km/h | 4.1 mm | Low 11 |
| 12 Nov | 33.8 °C | 55 % | 29 km/h | 4.2 mm | Very low 5 |
| 13 Nov | 34.6 °C | 48 % | 31 km/h | 0.9 mm | Low 7 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
↔
Before · 24 Oct 2026
After · 13 Nov 2026
Sentinel-2 did not pass over on that day. Try another date, or use false colour, which is daily.
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 4 November 2026 the air beside the fire reached 20 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).
PM2.5 peak20 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1020 µg/m³
Optical depth0.36
WHO 15
29 Oct31 Oct2 Nov4 Nov
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 · 257Every 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
- 796,044 haBarão de Melgaço13 July 2020 · 95 days · 14 km away
- 462,913 haBarão de Melgaço1 October 2023 · 54 days · 20 km away
- 42,419 haPoconé28 September 2024 · 21 days · 24 km away
- 128,779 haBarão de Melgaço1 August 2024 · 53 days · 31 km away
- 81,744 haBarão de Melgaço3 September 2024 · 52 days · 39 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Barão de Melgaço fire last?
- According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 31 October 2026 to 14 November 2026 (15 days). The perimeter dates it from 31 October 2026 to 12 November 2026.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 7,065 hectares (70.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 2 municipalities: Barão de Melgaço (7,020 ha, 0.6 %); Poconé (95 ha, 0.0 %).
- Is the Barão de Melgaço fire still active?
- Yes: satellites detected fire on 14 Nov 2026, 17:26 UTC. Check the emergency service for the official status.
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 37.8 °C, humidity dropped to 36 % and gusts hit 47 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 26, class 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 · 6 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 5 November 2026.
- Area: 6,566 → 7,065 ha.
- Area: 6,298 → 6,566 ha.
- Area: 6,026 → 6,298 ha.
- Area: 5,726 → 6,026 ha.
- Area: 5,054 → 5,726 ha.
- Page published (5,054 ha).
RSS Changes to this page With cross-checks and a citable version
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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 31 October 2026 to 12 November 2026. 257 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
- We have not matched this page with any official record.
- Weather: ECMWF IFS model, provisional until the ERA5 reanalysis arrives.
- Built-up area and population come from the JRC Global Human Settlement Layer (epoch 2025, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.
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.