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Gan County fire, October 2022 Gan County

Out · last measured on 19 Oct 2022

The fire started on 17 October 2022 in Gan County, China, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,218 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 148 in China in 2022, of 212.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Zhanggong District · 2022

We have the GWIS perimeter for this fire, but the VIIRS sensors did not capture it in enough detail: no day-by-day evolution, but the split by municipality is there.

Burnt area
1,218ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
3days
17 Oct 2022 – 19 Oct 2022
Municipalities hit
1
counties
Started on
17 Oct
2022
Danger at start
40
Very high · FWI index

Where it burned

The weather it burned in

27°high
61km/h · peak gust
25%lowest humidity

It had gone 38 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 0.8% of the area of London (12 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. Gan County where it started
    1,225 ha
    0.4 %

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)
17 Oct 27.1 °C 32 % 61 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
18 Oct 23.8 °C 25 % 58 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
19 Oct 24.0 °C 27 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
20 Oct after 27.3 °C 26 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
21 Oct after 29.6 °C 25 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
22 Oct after 30.4 °C 29 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
23 Oct after 28.5 °C 37 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
24 Oct after 27.9 °C 39 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
25 Oct after 28.1 °C 27 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
26 Oct after 29.4 °C 32 % 17 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
27 Oct after 25.8 °C 47 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
28 Oct after 20.4 °C 68 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
29 Oct after 21.2 °C 67 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 10 Oct 2022
After · 26 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 20 October 2022 the air beside the fire reached 110 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 58: 3.9 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak110 µg/m³
Days over the guideline8 days
PM10158 µg/m³
Optical depth0.65
1516171819202122
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)

Other fires nearby

All fires in China ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Gan County fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 17 October 2022 and 19 October 2022: 3 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 1,218 hectares (12.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Gan County (1,225 ha, 0.4 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 27.1 °C, humidity dropped to 25 % and gusts hit 61 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 40, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of China (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: 119 · 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 119.

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. No 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 ADM3 (Open Data Commons Open Database License 1.0). 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.