How long did the Greenview No. 16 fire last?

It burned between 30 April 2023 and 12 June 2023: 44 days, according to the dates recorded by Canada’s CWFIS and the heat detections seen by satellite.

How much area did it burn?

The official perimeter mapped by Canada’s CWFIS (Natural Resources Canada) is 43,227 hectares (432.3 km²). Other tallies, such as those of provincial agencies, may give slightly different figures.

Which census subdivisions burned?

The fire only entered Greenview No. 16 (43,043 ha, 1.3 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 30.2 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 66 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 32, class High.

Where does this data come from?

From the official burnt perimeter of Canada’s CWFIS (NBAC, Natural Resources Canada) or, for the current season and until NBAC publishes it, the one rebuilt by GWIS (Copernicus); from NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots; and from the administrative boundaries of Canada. It is not an official report.

CA · Canada · 2023-04-30 → 2023-06-12

Greenview No. 16 fire, April 2023 Greenview No. 16

Out · last detection 12 Jun 2023, 20:51 UTC

The fire started on 30 April 2023 in Greenview No. 16, Canada, and satellites saw it burning for 44 days. Canada’s CWFIS (Natural Resources Canada) mapped an official burnt perimeter of 43,227 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single census subdivision.

It is the 23th largest in Alberta since 2016 (of 243 with a page). Number 59 in Canada in 2023, of 489.

Compare with…

Burnt area: 43,227ha; official perimeter (CWFIS)
Duration: 44days; 30 Apr 2023 – 12 Jun 2023
Census subdivisions hit: 1; municipalities
Started on: 30 Apr; 2023
Heat detections: 6,639; in a single hotspot: 732 MW
Danger at start: 20; Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power: 5.9GW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 30 Apr12 Jun

Play back 12 Jun 2023

How it evolved, day by day

12 May 15 May 18 May 21 May 5 Jun 9 Jun 12 Jun

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

30°high

66km/h · peak gust

14%lowest humidity

It had gone 3 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 9.6 mm on 13 Jun.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 27% of the area of London (432 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 census subdivision

Greenview No. 16 where it started

43,043 ha reached on 12 May

1.3 %

Burnt area inside each census subdivision, 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 2025

Built-up area3.9 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 3.9 hectares of 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)
30 Apr	27.0 °C	15 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
1 May	23.5 °C	24 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 19
2 May	23.0 °C	26 %	26 km/h	1.0 mm	Moderate 12
3 May	27.5 °C	20 %	30 km/h	1.1 mm	Moderate 16
4 May	26.9 °C	21 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 18
5 May	25.8 °C	16 %	64 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
6 May	18.3 °C	24 %	66 km/h	0.2 mm	High 30
7 May	12.7 °C	46 %	38 km/h	3.5 mm	Very low 3
8 May	15.1 °C	39 %	23 km/h	0.2 mm	Very low 4
9 May	16.8 °C	38 %	29 km/h	1.3 mm	Very low 4
10 May	18.5 °C	38 %	27 km/h	2.2 mm	Very low 2
11 May	19.8 °C	33 %	24 km/h	1.6 mm	Very low 4
12 May	24.6 °C	19 %	25 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 15
13 May	28.4 °C	15 %	22 km/h	0.0 mm	High 24
14 May	29.0 °C	14 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
15 May	29.0 °C	17 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
16 May	19.2 °C	26 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
17 May	19.6 °C	25 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	High 23
18 May	22.1 °C	26 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
19 May	25.5 °C	24 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
20 May	23.6 °C	34 %	22 km/h	2.4 mm	Low 6
21 May	24.3 °C	35 %	24 km/h	7.5 mm	Very low 3
22 May	12.8 °C	89 %	40 km/h	31.5 mm	Very low 0
23 May	9.2 °C	98 %	45 km/h	35.5 mm	Very low 0
24 May	15.5 °C	57 %	36 km/h	0.2 mm	Very low 0
25 May	18.4 °C	47 %	25 km/h	2.1 mm	Very low 0
26 May	24.4 °C	22 %	29 km/h	0.0 mm	Very low 4
27 May	23.7 °C	34 %	28 km/h	1.0 mm	Low 6
28 May	21.9 °C	28 %	51 km/h	1.1 mm	Low 8
29 May	21.1 °C	19 %	36 km/h	0.6 mm	Moderate 13
30 May	17.1 °C	50 %	37 km/h	9.9 mm	Very low 0
31 May	14.9 °C	55 %	25 km/h	8.7 mm	Very low 0
1 Jun	17.2 °C	35 %	25 km/h	0.1 mm	Very low 1
2 Jun	23.6 °C	29 %	36 km/h	0.2 mm	Low 6
3 Jun	26.2 °C	28 %	43 km/h	0.3 mm	Moderate 12
4 Jun	26.4 °C	28 %	51 km/h	0.7 mm	Moderate 14
5 Jun	13.4 °C	34 %	40 km/h	0.5 mm	Moderate 13
6 Jun	23.4 °C	17 %	25 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 15
7 Jun	26.2 °C	19 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 18
8 Jun	27.6 °C	24 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 21
9 Jun	30.2 °C	24 %	53 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
10 Jun	25.7 °C	42 %	45 km/h	5.9 mm	Very low 4
11 Jun	23.5 °C	39 %	35 km/h	0.2 mm	Low 7
12 Jun	26.5 °C	28 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 13
13 Jun after	19.9 °C	52 %	43 km/h	9.6 mm	Very low 1

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 23 Apr 2023

After · 19 Jun 2023

Before After

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 May 2023 the air beside the fire reached 587 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 264: 18 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak587 µg/m³

Days over the guideline25 days

PM10838 µg/m³

Optical depth3.91

WHO 15

28293012345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031123456789101112131415

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 · 6,639Every 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

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Greenview No. 16 fire last?: It burned between 30 April 2023 and 12 June 2023: 44 days, according to the dates recorded by Canada’s CWFIS and the heat detections seen by satellite.
How much area did it burn?: The official perimeter mapped by Canada’s CWFIS (Natural Resources Canada) is 43,227 hectares (432.3 km²). Other tallies, such as those of provincial agencies, may give slightly different figures.
Which census subdivisions burned?: The fire only entered Greenview No. 16 (43,043 ha, 1.3 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 30.2 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 66 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 32, class High.
Where does this data come from?: From the official burnt perimeter of Canada’s CWFIS (NBAC, Natural Resources Canada) or, for the current season and until NBAC publishes it, the one rebuilt by GWIS (Copernicus); from NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots; and from the administrative boundaries of Canada. 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

NASA FIRMS ↗
CWFIS · Interactive map ↗

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.

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What do you think is wrong?

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What really happened?

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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: NBAC (Natural Resources Canada), official.
Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 6,639 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 is official: it comes from the National Burned Area Composite (NBAC) of the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System (CWFIS), Natural Resources Canada, which maps it on satellite imagery and publishes it under the Open Government Licence – Canada. Until NBAC publishes the current season, this year’s fires carry the perimeter rebuilt from heat detections by GWIS (Copernicus, CC BY 4.0), which is approximate. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. Census subdivision boundaries come from geoBoundaries ADM3 (Open Data Commons Open Database License 1.0). The area per census subdivision is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ slightly from official figures.

Where it burned