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Boca do Acre fire, 13 August 2024 Boca do Acre

Out · last detection 30 Aug 2024, 05:30 UTC

The fire started on 13 August 2024 in Boca do Acre, Brazil, and satellites saw it burning for 19 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 4,051 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 250th largest in Amazonas since 2016 (of 450 with a page). Number 898 in Brazil in 2024, of 1301.

Compare with…
Burnt area
4,051ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
19days
13 Aug 2024 – 31 Aug 2024
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
13 Aug
2024
Heat detections
261
in a single hotspot: 151 MW
Danger at start
34
High · FWI index
Average daily power
172MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 13 Aug31 Aug
30 Aug 2024

How it evolved, day by day

14 Aug 2024 · 21 MW · 3 15 Aug 2024 · 1 MW · 1 16 Aug 2024 · 10 MW · 1 17 Aug 2024 · 7 MW · 4 19 Aug 2024 · 2 MW · 1 20 Aug 2024 · 119 MW · 5 21 Aug 2024 · 247 MW · 5 22 Aug 2024 · 172 MW · 28 23 Aug 2024 · 585 MW · 45 24 Aug 2024 · 114 MW · 32 25 Aug 2024 · 119 MW · 31 26 Aug 2024 · 263 MW · 11 27 Aug 2024 · 547 MW · 31 28 Aug 2024 · 393 MW · 32 29 Aug 2024 · 147 MW · 30 30 Aug 2024 · 3 MW · 1
14 Aug 17 Aug 21 Aug 23 Aug 24 Aug 27 Aug 30 Aug

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
40km/h · peak gust
27%lowest humidity

It had gone 4 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 4.8 mm on 5 Sept.

This area had burned before

87% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 286 ha in 2016, 561 ha in 2017, 674 ha in 2018, 675 ha in 2019, 287 ha in 2020, 2,534 ha in 2021, 2,813 ha in 2022, 2,105 ha in 2023. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 3,507 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 2.6% of the area of London (41 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. Boca do Acre 35,447 inhabitants where it started
    4,074 ha reached on 14 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 2025
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable 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) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
14 Aug 34.5 °C 27 % 20 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
15 Aug 35.6 °C 28 % 20 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
16 Aug 35.6 °C 35 % 20 km/h 0.6 mm High 29
17 Aug 32.3 °C 43 % 13 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
18 Aug 35.6 °C 39 % 23 km/h 0.3 mm High 26
19 Aug 36.1 °C 35 % 19 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
20 Aug 36.8 °C 33 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
21 Aug 34.1 °C 43 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
22 Aug 37.4 °C 30 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
23 Aug 37.9 °C 28 % 23 km/h 0.1 mm High 34
24 Aug 38.2 °C 28 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
25 Aug 31.0 °C 41 % 40 km/h 0.7 mm High 28
26 Aug 28.4 °C 31 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
27 Aug 32.6 °C 29 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
28 Aug 34.6 °C 30 % 18 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
29 Aug 36.5 °C 27 % 16 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
30 Aug 35.4 °C 35 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
31 Aug 37.1 °C 31 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
1 Sept after 37.1 °C 29 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
2 Sept after 35.2 °C 27 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
3 Sept after 35.0 °C 38 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
4 Sept after 36.5 °C 42 % 21 km/h 0.2 mm High 29
5 Sept after 33.3 °C 57 % 31 km/h 4.8 mm Low 6

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 6 Aug 2024
After · 7 Sept 2024

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 31 August 2024 the air beside the fire reached 408 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 244: 16 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak408 µg/m³
Days over the guideline21 days
PM10583 µg/m³
Optical depth4.28
141516171819202122232425262728293031123
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 · 261Every 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 Boca do Acre fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 13 August 2024 to 31 August 2024 (19 days). The perimeter dates it from 16 August 2024 to 31 August 2024.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 4,051 hectares (40.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Boca do Acre (4,074 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 38.2 °C, humidity dropped to 27 % and gusts hit 40 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 37, 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Start date: 16 August 2024 → 13 August 2024.

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 16 August 2024 to 31 August 2024. 261 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 2025, 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.