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Double Creek Fire, August 2022 Wallowa, Idaho

Out · last detection 29 Sept 2022, 09:23 UTC

The fire started on 30 August 2022 in Wallowa, United States, and satellites saw it burning for 31 days. United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) mapped an official burnt perimeter of 69,148 hectares, spread across 2 counties.

It is the 11th largest in Oregon since 2016 (of 327 with a page). Number 6 in United States in 2022, of 493.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Buck · 2017Indian Ridge · 2017Jones Creek · 2022Gun Club · 2016

Burnt area
69,148ha
official perimeter (MTBS / NIFC)
Duration
≈ 31days
30 Aug 2022 – 29 Sept 2022
Counties hit
2
counties
Started on
30 Aug
2022
Heat detections
5,596
in a single hotspot: 482 MW
Danger at start
32
High · FWI index
Average daily power
2.4GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 30 Aug29 Sept
29 Sept 2022

How it evolved, day by day

31 Aug 2022 · 2,232 MW · 28 1 Sept 2022 · 4,751 MW · 128 2 Sept 2022 · 1,906 MW · 167 3 Sept 2022 · 9,157 MW · 224 4 Sept 2022 · 5,563 MW · 858 5 Sept 2022 · 3,024 MW · 470 6 Sept 2022 · 11,306 MW · 576 7 Sept 2022 · 4,156 MW · 469 8 Sept 2022 · 4,961 MW · 814 9 Sept 2022 · 3,169 MW · 775 10 Sept 2022 · 8,268 MW · 423 11 Sept 2022 · 1,857 MW · 306 12 Sept 2022 · 422 MW · 122 13 Sept 2022 · 100 MW · 9 14 Sept 2022 · 43 MW · 16 15 Sept 2022 · 9 MW · 5 17 Sept 2022 · 8 MW · 5 18 Sept 2022 · 3 MW · 1 19 Sept 2022 · 1 MW · 1 20 Sept 2022 · 63 MW · 11 21 Sept 2022 · 5 MW · 3 25 Sept 2022 · 11 MW · 3 26 Sept 2022 · 22 MW · 6 27 Sept 2022 · 386 MW · 53 28 Sept 2022 · 889 MW · 121 29 Sept 2022 · 7 MW · 2
31 Aug 4 Sept 6 Sept 8 Sept 12 Sept 17 Sept 21 Sept 28 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

32°high
60km/h · peak gust
12%lowest humidity

It had gone 7 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 9.5 mm on 30 Sept.

This area had burned before

1% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 500 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 44% of the area of London (691 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 county

  1. Wallowa where it started
    69,156 ha reached on 31 Aug
    8.5 %
  2. Idaho
    20 ha reached on 4 Sept
    0.0 %

Burnt area inside each county, 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.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2020
Built-up area1.2 ha
Residents≈ 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 1.2 hectares of built-up land and about 20 residents (GHSL 2020, 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)
30 Aug 30.6 °C 16 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
31 Aug 32.2 °C 15 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
1 Sept 28.7 °C 16 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
2 Sept 31.5 °C 12 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
3 Sept 25.9 °C 23 % 60 km/h 0.3 mm High 38
4 Sept 28.2 °C 19 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
5 Sept 25.5 °C 25 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
6 Sept 31.1 °C 18 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
7 Sept 26.9 °C 27 % 38 km/h 0.8 mm High 27
8 Sept 19.2 °C 16 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
9 Sept 18.8 °C 21 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
10 Sept 23.6 °C 17 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
11 Sept 25.5 °C 18 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
12 Sept 21.4 °C 26 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
13 Sept 18.7 °C 48 % 20 km/h 3.1 mm Very low 4
14 Sept 18.6 °C 52 % 24 km/h 1.3 mm Very low 4
15 Sept 15.2 °C 64 % 24 km/h 3.7 mm Very low 0
16 Sept 18.0 °C 37 % 26 km/h 1.1 mm Very low 4
17 Sept 18.2 °C 36 % 28 km/h 0.2 mm Low 8
18 Sept 14.9 °C 60 % 22 km/h 1.1 mm Very low 5
19 Sept 20.0 °C 38 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Low 10
20 Sept 18.4 °C 41 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 15
21 Sept 17.1 °C 39 % 28 km/h 6.4 mm Very low 1
22 Sept 13.7 °C 45 % 50 km/h 3.6 mm Very low 1
23 Sept 18.5 °C 31 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very low 3
24 Sept 21.5 °C 28 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Low 10
25 Sept 22.8 °C 28 % 18 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
26 Sept 24.8 °C 17 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
27 Sept 27.2 °C 16 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
28 Sept 23.6 °C 21 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
29 Sept 12.6 °C 55 % 32 km/h 9.7 mm Very low 0
30 Sept after 12.4 °C 63 % 35 km/h 9.5 mm Very low 0

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 23 Aug 2022
After · 6 Oct 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 2 September 2022 the air beside the fire reached 175 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 78: 5.2 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak175 µg/m³
Days over the guideline2 days
PM10250 µg/m³
Optical depth0.86
2829303112
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 · 5,596Every 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 United States ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Double Creek Fire last?
The official perimeter only gives the start date (30 August 2022). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 29 September 2022 (31 days from 30 August 2022), the last day with detections before more than 10 days in a row without any, so it is approximate.
How much area did it burn?
The official perimeter published by United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) is 69,148 hectares (691.5 km²). Other tallies, such as daily incident reports, may give slightly different figures.
Which counties burned?
The fire entered 2 counties: Wallowa (69,156 ha, 8.5 %); Idaho (20 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 32.2 °C, humidity dropped to 12 % and gusts hit 60 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 38, class High.
Where does this data come from?
From the official burnt perimeter of United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC, public domain), NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of United States. 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: 911 · 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
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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 911.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: MTBS (US Geological Survey and US Forest Service), official.
  • The official perimeter has no end date: the end is the last day with VIIRS detections inside the perimeter before a gap of more than 10 days (150 days at most), so it is approximate. 5,596 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 2020, 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 is official and in the public domain. For past years it comes from MTBS (Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity), run by the U.S. Geological Survey and the USDA Forest Service, which map it on Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery. For the current and last year it comes from WFIGS at the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC): incident perimeters mapped by fire crews, aircraft and imagery. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. County boundaries come from geoBoundaries ADM2 (Public Domain). The area per county is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ slightly from official figures.