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Barra do Corda fire, 1 September 2016 Barra do Corda

Out · last detection 8 Sept 2016, 16:45 UTC

The fire started on 1 September 2016 in Barra do Corda, Brazil, and satellites saw it burning for 8 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 3,831 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 376th largest in Maranhão since 2016 (of 607 with a page). Number 429 in Brazil in 2016, of 649.

Compare with…
Burnt area
3,831ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
8days
1 Sept 2016 – 8 Sept 2016
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
1 Sept
2016
Heat detections
162
in a single hotspot: 167 MW
Danger at start
39
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
303MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Sept8 Sept
8 Sept 2016

How it evolved, day by day

1 Sept 2016 · 167 MW · 8 2 Sept 2016 · 302 MW · 30 3 Sept 2016 · 595 MW · 58 4 Sept 2016 · 450 MW · 13 5 Sept 2016 · 784 MW · 37 6 Sept 2016 · 79 MW · 9 7 Sept 2016 · 6 MW · 2 8 Sept 2016 · 42 MW · 5
1 Sept 3 Sept 5 Sept 7 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

38°high
43km/h · peak gust
27%lowest humidity

It had gone 53 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 2.4% of the area of London (38 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. Barra do Corda 84,532 inhabitants where it started
    3,856 ha reached on 1 Sept
    0.7 %

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 area0.64 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.64 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)
1 Sept 38.3 °C 33 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
2 Sept 37.4 °C 31 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
3 Sept 35.7 °C 30 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
4 Sept 34.6 °C 32 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
5 Sept 37.5 °C 31 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
6 Sept 38.0 °C 30 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
7 Sept 37.9 °C 33 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
8 Sept 36.8 °C 40 % 30 km/h 2.1 mm Moderate 18
9 Sept after 35.4 °C 46 % 31 km/h 0.4 mm High 24
10 Sept after 37.6 °C 27 % 35 km/h 0.3 mm High 37
11 Sept after 37.4 °C 29 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
12 Sept after 37.7 °C 33 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
13 Sept after 36.7 °C 43 % 36 km/h 0.3 mm High 31
14 Sept after 37.4 °C 31 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
15 Sept after 36.9 °C 40 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
16 Sept after 36.7 °C 42 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
17 Sept after 36.5 °C 42 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
18 Sept after 34.7 °C 46 % 29 km/h 0.2 mm High 30
19 Sept after 37.3 °C 33 % 34 km/h 0.1 mm High 32
20 Sept after 36.2 °C 44 % 31 km/h 0.3 mm High 33
21 Sept after 36.6 °C 41 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
22 Sept after 36.1 °C 43 % 36 km/h 0.4 mm High 35
23 Sept after 34.2 °C 49 % 35 km/h 0.9 mm High 22
24 Sept after 35.3 °C 46 % 30 km/h 0.3 mm High 23

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 25 Aug 2016
After · 15 Sept 2016

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 · 162Every 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

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Barra do Corda fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 1 September 2016 and 8 September 2016: 8 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 3,831 hectares (38.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Barra do Corda (3,856 ha, 0.7 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 38.3 °C, humidity dropped to 27 % and gusts hit 43 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 42, 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 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

No changes since 24 October 2026.

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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 162 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.