Burned area
satellite only1,551ha
Perimeter published by EFFIS (Copernicus).
- Source
- EFFIS (Copernicus)
- Date
- perimeter revised on 26 August 2022
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page to compare it with.
IT · Italy · –
Buseto Palizzolo fire, August 2022 Buseto Palizzolo, Castellammare del Golfo
Out · last detection 19 Aug 2022, 11:47 UTC
The fire started on 18 August 2022 in Buseto Palizzolo, Italy, and satellites saw it burning for 2 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 1,551 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 2 municipalities.
It is the 5th largest in Trapani since 2016 (of 68 with a page). The largest in Italy in 2022, of 161.
Use this data
Compare with…
Use this data
Fire page data · version 2026-10-24matches 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 only2days
18 Aug 2022 to 19 Aug 2022: first and last day with fire on the page.
- Source
- EFFIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- last detection: 19 Aug 2022, 11:47 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 only18 Aug 2022
First day with fire seen by the satellites or the perimeter.
- Source
- EFFIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- 18 Aug 2022
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page, so the alert time and the cause are not known here.
Hotspots
satellite only44
VIIRS detections at 375 m. Most intense hotspot: 185 MW.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (Suomi NPP)
- Date
- 18 Aug 2022 – 19 Aug 2022
+− 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 only1,205MW
Total radiative power on 18 August 2022; hotspots that day: 43.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (FRP)
- Date
- 18 Aug 2022
+− 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
model54.2FWI · extreme
Fire Weather Index (Canadian system) computed by WorldFires for the day the fire started. Consecutive days without rain before: 5.
- Source
- WorldFires calculation (Canadian FWI system)
- Date
- 18 Aug 2022, local noon
- Model
- ERA5 0,25° (ECMWF · Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com
+− 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
model37.2°C · 30% RH
High of 37.2 °C and minimum humidity of 30% on 18 August 2022; gusts of 67 km/h on 18 August 2022.
- Source
- weather model at the fire’s grid cell
- Date
- 18 Aug 2022 – 19 Aug 2022
- Model
- ERA5 0,25° (ECMWF · Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com
+− 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 24 October 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
-
· reconstructed weatherWeather and FWI computed from the ERA5 reanalysis
-
· reconstructed perimeterEFFIS (Copernicus) revises the perimeter
What was saved on 24 October 2026
Every night a snapshot of what the page shows is saved. If anything changes, it appears in the list as a log entry.
- Area
- 1,551 ha
- Dates
- 18 Aug 2022 – 19 Aug 2022
- Name
- Buseto Palizzolo
- Official record
- —
Versioned permanent link
https://worldfires.org/en/fire/buseto-palizzolo-2022-08?v=2026-10-24A 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 buseto-palizzolo-2022-08.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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022-08-18 | 43 | 1,205 | 37.2 | 28.7 | 30 | 32.5 | 67.3 | 0 | 54.2 | extremo | 1 |
| 2022-08-19 | 1 | 2 | 30.5 | 26.1 | 41 | 22.3 | 49.7 | 0 | 35.1 | alto | 1 |
| 2022-08-20 | 0 | 0 | 30.1 | 24 | 48 | 17.5 | 46.4 | 0 | 27.5 | alto | 0 |
| 2022-08-21 | 0 | 0 | 30.6 | 22.9 | 42 | 18.7 | 43.9 | 0.8 | 24.4 | alto | 0 |
| 2022-08-22 | 0 | 0 | 30.6 | 20.8 | 43 | 15.5 | 38.2 | 0.4 | 24.3 | alto | 0 |
| 2022-08-23 | 0 | 0 | 30 | 21.1 | 42 | 15.1 | 33.8 | 0 | 24.7 | alto | 0 |
| 2022-08-24 | 0 | 0 | 29.6 | 21 | 49 | 15.9 | 38.5 | 0 | 25.5 | alto | 0 |
| 2022-08-25 | 0 | 0 | 29.7 | 22.1 | 45 | 18 | 39.6 | 0 | 27.2 | alto | 0 |
| 2022-08-26 | 0 | 0 | 30 | 22.5 | 51 | 14 | 30.2 | 0.2 | 24.6 | alto | 0 |
| 2022-08-27 | 0 | 0 | 30 | 21.6 | 51 | 9.3 | 29.9 | 0.2 | 21.9 | alto | 0 |
| 2022-08-28 | 0 | 0 | 27.2 | 22.7 | 60 | 10.6 | 35.6 | 7.7 | 2.5 | muy_bajo | 0 |
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: EFFIS (Copernicus), NASA FIRMS (VIIRS), ERA5 (ECMWF/Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0). Open-Meteo.com · How we build fire pages: methodology
- Burnt area
- 1,551ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- 2days
- 18 Aug 2022 – 19 Aug 2022
- Municipalities hit
- 2
- municipalities
- Started on
- 18 Aug
- 2022
- Heat detections
- 44
- in a single hotspot: 185 MW
- Danger at start
- 54
- Extreme · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 604MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
HOTSPOTS BY DAY
18 Aug19 Aug
19 Aug 2022
How it evolved, day by day
18 Aug
19 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
37°high
67km/h · peak gust
30%lowest humidity
It had gone 5 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 7.7 mm on 28 Aug.
This area had burned before
39% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 4 ha in 2016, 239 ha in 2017, 82 ha in 2018, 114 ha in 2019, 142 ha in 2020, 203 ha in 2021. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 608 ha that had burned before.
- 214 ha Buseto Palizzolo fire, August 2017 241 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 154 ha Buseto Palizzolo fire, August 2021 187 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 141 ha Buseto Palizzolo fire, August 2020 140 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 114 ha Buseto Palizzolo fire, August 2019 129 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 82 ha Buseto Palizzolo fire, July 2018 129 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 4 ha Buseto Palizzolo fire, July 2016 127 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).
Rome boundary: geoBoundaries · ISTAT, National Institute of Statistics (CC BY 3.0).
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).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
1,247 ha reached on 18 Aug17 %
-
Castellammare del Golfo 14,610 inhabitants · 9.6 km from the centre306 ha2.4 %
Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the official 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.
What burned
- Agricultural areas59 %
- Broadleaved forest19 %
- Sclerophyllous scrub9.5 %
- Coniferous forest8.4 %
- Other natural land2.1 %
- Mixed forest1.5 %
Natura 2000 protected area affected: 37 %
- LIC Complesso Monte Bosco e Scorace ITA010008
Natura 2000 sites (European Environment Agency, 2024 release) crossed by the perimeter.
Land cover inside the perimeter according to Corine Land Cover, as reported by Copernicus.
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)
Started with Strong wind: 22 % of the area in Italy
| Day | High | Min. humidity | Peak gust | Rain | Danger (FWI) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 18 Aug | 37.2 °C | 30 % | 67 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 54 |
| 19 Aug | 30.5 °C | 41 % | 50 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 35 |
| 20 Aug after | 30.1 °C | 48 % | 46 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 28 |
| 21 Aug after | 30.6 °C | 42 % | 44 km/h | 0.8 mm | High 24 |
| 22 Aug after | 30.6 °C | 43 % | 38 km/h | 0.4 mm | High 24 |
| 23 Aug after | 30.0 °C | 42 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 25 |
| 24 Aug after | 29.6 °C | 49 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 26 |
| 25 Aug after | 29.7 °C | 45 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 27 |
| 26 Aug after | 30.0 °C | 51 % | 30 km/h | 0.2 mm | High 25 |
| 27 Aug after | 30.0 °C | 51 % | 30 km/h | 0.2 mm | High 22 |
| 28 Aug after | 27.2 °C | 60 % | 36 km/h | 7.7 mm | Very low 2 |
Its twins: fires that started in the same weather
It started with an FWI of 54.2, a minimum humidity of 30% and 5 days without rain. Fires in the area that started in weather like this since 2016: 18.
FWI at the start
54.2
Minimum humidity
30 %
Days without rain
5
this fire
chosen twins
rest of the area
Almost identicalSimilar
Outlines of the closest twins
This fire · Buseto Palizzolo fire, August 2022
1,551 ha
2 days
FWI 54.2
Min. humidity 30 %
Salemi fire, August 2023
1,567 ha
2 days
FWI 50.3
Min. humidity 30 %
11 km away, in 2023
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: 2.7 mm on 7 Sept.
Custonaci fire, August 2023
292 ha
2 days
FWI 51.5
Min. humidity 29 %
15 km away, in 2023
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
Castellammare del Golfo fire, August 2023
144 ha
1 day
FWI 48.9
Min. humidity 28 %
9 km away, in 2023
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
San Vito Lo Capo fire, August 2019
173 ha
1 day
FWI 49.2
Min. humidity 29 %
20 km away, in 2019
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
Casteltermini fire, August 2017
353 ha
1 day
FWI 46.2
Min. humidity 31 %
92 km away, in 2017
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
What happened to them
- 1 day
- median duration
- 308 ha
- median area
- 22 %
- went past 1,000 ha
- 4.1 mm
- rain at the end (median; 10 of 18 had it)
It was 5.0 times larger than the median of its twins and lasted 2 days, against 1 day.
Only 2 of its 18 twins burned more. The weather on the first day does not explain everything: the wind in the following days, the fuel and the firefighting also count. In 8 of 18, not even 1 mm fell in the ten days after the end: they went out without rain. In the rest, the first rainy day brought a median of 4.1 mm.
This is a bank of analogues: it shows what usually happens, not what will happen. With fewer than 15 twins we give no figures. How we calculate it
How it ended
7.7 mmfirst rain
28 Aug9 days after it ended
67km/h · max. gust
It was considered over on 19 Aug, and on 28 Aug 7.7 mm fell. We do not know whether the rain or the firefighters put it out. Twins with rain when they ended: 10 of 18, with a median of 4.1 mm.
Weather on this page: Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)
How a twin is chosen
- Same area: fires that have already ended, less than 250 km from this one, since 2016.
- Same start: we compare the FWI on the first day, the minimum humidity that day and the run of days without rain before it. The slider sets how much they may differ.
- Only pages with final weather data (ERA5 reanalysis) calculated in the same way as this fire’s; agricultural and grass burns and pages with data under review are left out.
- Fires burning at the same time as this one (a week before or after) are left out: they share the same spell of weather and do not count as a precedent.
- They are sorted by similarity, and the outlines of the first five are drawn.
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
↔
Before · 11 Aug 2022
After · 26 Aug 2022
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 18 August 2022 the air beside the fire reached 19 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).
PM2.5 peak19 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1042 µg/m³
Optical depth0.94
WHO 15
16 Aug19 Aug22 Aug25 Aug28 Aug
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 · 44Every 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
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Buseto Palizzolo fire last?
- According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 18 August 2022 to 19 August 2022 (2 days). The perimeter dates it from 18 August 2022 to 18 August 2022.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 1,551 hectares (15.5 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 2 municipalities: Buseto Palizzolo (1,247 ha, 17 %); Castellammare del Golfo (306 ha, 2.4 %).
- Did the fire reach a town?
- The fire started in Buseto Palizzolo and came within 1.7 km of its centre. That is the distance from the perimeter, or the nearest hotspot, to the point marking the centre; it does not mean it entered the houses.
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 37.2 °C, humidity dropped to 30 % and gusts hit 67 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 54, class Extreme.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Italy (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.
- How did the fires that started in similar weather in this area end?
- Fires less than 250 km away that started since 2016 with a similar FWI, humidity and dry spell: 18. Their median duration was 1 day and their median area 308 ha; 22 % went past 1,000 ha. Only 2 of its 18 twins burned more. The weather on the first day does not explain everything: the wind in the following days, the fuel and the firefighting also count. In 8 of 18, not even 1 mm fell in the ten days after the end: they went out without rain. In the rest, the first rainy day brought a median of 4.1 mm.
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: 112 · 1515 · 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 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: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
- Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 18 August 2022 to 18 August 2022. 44 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 and land cover come from the Copernicus European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), measured on MODIS and Sentinel-2 imagery and published under CC BY 4.0. 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 ADM4 (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ slightly from each country’s official figure.