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Cáceres fire, September 2022 Cáceres

Out · last detection 7 Sept 2022, 04:48 UTC

The fire started on 1 September 2022 in Cáceres, Brazil, and satellites saw it burning for 7 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 3,919 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1448th largest in Mato Grosso since 2016 (of 1996 with a page). Number 430 in Brazil in 2022, of 687.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Cáceres · 2019Cáceres · 2021Cáceres · 2020Cáceres · 2020

Burnt area
3,919ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
7days
1 Sept 2022 – 7 Sept 2022
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
1 Sept
2022
Heat detections
158
in a single hotspot: 33 MW
Danger at start
41
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
136MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Sept7 Sept
7 Sept 2022

How it evolved, day by day

1 Sept 2022 · 24 MW · 2 2 Sept 2022 · 208 MW · 24 3 Sept 2022 · 114 MW · 31 4 Sept 2022 · 184 MW · 24 5 Sept 2022 · 81 MW · 29 6 Sept 2022 · 281 MW · 33 7 Sept 2022 · 61 MW · 15
1 Sept 2 Sept 3 Sept 4 Sept 5 Sept 6 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

37°high
46km/h · peak gust
22%lowest humidity

It had gone 13 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.7 mm on 15 Sept.

This area had burned before

76% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,961 ha in 2019.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 2.5% of the area of London (39 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. Cáceres 89,681 inhabitants where it started
    3,933 ha reached on 1 Sept
    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.

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 36.6 °C 22 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
2 Sept 36.1 °C 23 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
3 Sept 28.4 °C 46 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
4 Sept 29.7 °C 40 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
5 Sept 32.1 °C 35 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
6 Sept 33.5 °C 32 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
7 Sept 36.8 °C 25 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
8 Sept after 37.0 °C 28 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
9 Sept after 36.2 °C 31 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
10 Sept after 30.5 °C 37 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
11 Sept after 33.6 °C 29 % 19 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
12 Sept after 35.7 °C 30 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
13 Sept after 36.0 °C 33 % 17 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
14 Sept after 27.3 °C 46 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
15 Sept after 20.7 °C 66 % 29 km/h 1.7 mm Low 8

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 25 Aug 2022
After · 14 Sept 2022

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 9 September 2022 the air beside the fire reached 78 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 61: 4.1 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak78 µg/m³
Days over the guideline7 days
PM10112 µg/m³
Optical depth1.66
303112345678910
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 · 158Every 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 Cáceres fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 1 September 2022 and 7 September 2022: 7 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 3,919 hectares (39.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Cáceres (3,933 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 36.8 °C, humidity dropped to 22 % and gusts hit 46 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 41, 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. 158 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.

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.