How long did the Griffin Fire last?

The official perimeter only gives the start date (15 August 2020). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 26 August 2020 (12 days from 15 August 2020), 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 25,654 hectares (256.5 km²). Other tallies, such as daily incident reports, may give slightly different figures.

Which counties burned?

The fire only entered Gila (25,646 ha, 2.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 42.5 °C, humidity dropped to 11 % and gusts hit 52 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 61, class Extreme.

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.

US · United States · 2020-08-15 → 2020-08-26

Griffin Fire, August 2020 Gila

Out · last detection 26 Aug 2020, 21:09 UTC

The fire started on 15 August 2020 in Gila, United States, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) mapped an official burnt perimeter of 25,654 hectares, spread across a single county.

It is the 8th largest in Arizona since 2016 (of 380 with a page). Number 36 in United States in 2020, of 441.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Champion · 2019 Blue River · 2020 Cassadore Springs · 2020 Valley · 2020

Burnt area: 25,654ha; official perimeter (MTBS / NIFC)
Duration: ≈ 12days; 15 Aug 2020 – 26 Aug 2020
Counties hit: 1; counties
Started on: 15 Aug; 2020
Heat detections: 815; in a single hotspot: 553 MW
Danger at start: 49; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 2.9GW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 15 Aug26 Aug

Play back 26 Aug 2020

How it evolved, day by day

16 Aug 18 Aug 20 Aug 21 Aug 22 Aug 24 Aug 26 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

42°high

52km/h · peak gust

11%lowest humidity

It had gone 2 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.7 mm on 1 Sept.

This area had burned before

3% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 698 ha in 2019.

698 ha Champion fire, August 2019 796 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 16% of the area of London (257 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

Gila where it started

25,646 ha reached on 16 Aug

2.1 %

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 area0.16 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.16 hectares of built-up land and almost nobody lived there (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)
15 Aug	41.4 °C	14 %	37 km/h	2.0 mm	Very high 49
16 Aug	42.5 °C	11 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 61
17 Aug	40.1 °C	17 %	52 km/h	0.6 mm	Extreme 56
18 Aug	40.7 °C	15 %	50 km/h	0.2 mm	Very high 44
19 Aug	41.2 °C	11 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 52
20 Aug	40.1 °C	20 %	49 km/h	2.4 mm	Very high 42
21 Aug	36.2 °C	27 %	47 km/h	0.3 mm	Very high 42
22 Aug	38.3 °C	24 %	37 km/h	2.1 mm	High 29
23 Aug	39.1 °C	21 %	28 km/h	1.6 mm	High 33
24 Aug	40.4 °C	13 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
25 Aug	39.1 °C	16 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 50
26 Aug	39.4 °C	15 %	26 km/h	0.3 mm	Very high 46
27 Aug after	40.2 °C	16 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 52
28 Aug after	39.3 °C	15 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 55
29 Aug after	37.7 °C	21 %	46 km/h	0.9 mm	Very high 43
30 Aug after	35.6 °C	31 %	43 km/h	0.7 mm	High 36
31 Aug after	32.8 °C	29 %	47 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
1 Sept after	32.5 °C	36 %	47 km/h	2.7 mm	Moderate 18

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 8 Aug 2020

After · 2 Sept 2020

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.

Detections table · 815Every 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

All fires in United States ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Griffin Fire last?: The official perimeter only gives the start date (15 August 2020). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 26 August 2020 (12 days from 15 August 2020), 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 25,654 hectares (256.5 km²). Other tallies, such as daily incident reports, may give slightly different figures.
Which counties burned?: The fire only entered Gila (25,646 ha, 2.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 42.5 °C, humidity dropped to 11 % and gusts hit 52 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 61, class Extreme.
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

NASA FIRMS ↗
NIFC · Fire maps ↗

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.

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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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How we know this

Perimeter: MTBS (US Geological Survey and US Forest Service), official; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
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. 815 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.

Where it burned