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CN · China · –

Guiyang County fire, October 2022 桂阳县 · Guiyang County

Out · last measured on 2 Nov 2022

The fire started on 31 October 2022 in Guiyang County, China, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,229 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 9th largest in Hunan Province since 2016 (of 14 with a page). Number 143 in China in 2022, of 210.

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
1,229ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
3days
31 Oct 2022 – 2 Nov 2022
Municipalities hit
1
counties
Started on
31 Oct
2022
Danger at start
30
High · FWI index

Where it burned

The weather it burned in

24°high
60km/h · peak gust
36%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.2 mm on 4 Nov.

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. Guiyang County 桂阳县 where it started
    1,237 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.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2020
Built-up area0.23 ha
Residents≈ 60

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.23 hectares of built-up land and about 60 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)

Started with Strong wind: 24 % of the area in China 60 days without rain: 3.3 % of the area in China

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
31 Oct 21.2 °C 47 % 60 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
1 Nov 22.3 °C 39 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
2 Nov 23.6 °C 36 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
3 Nov after 18.5 °C 52 % 29 km/h 0.4 mm Moderate 14
4 Nov after 16.1 °C 73 % 29 km/h 2.2 mm Low 6

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 24 Oct 2022
After · 9 Nov 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 3 November 2022 the air beside the fire reached 69 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 48: 3.2 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak69 µg/m³
Days over the guideline8 days
PM10100 µg/m³
Optical depth0.94
29 Oct31 Oct2 Nov4 Nov
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 Guiyang County fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 31 October 2022 and 2 November 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 1,229 hectares (12.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Guiyang County (1,237 ha, 0.4 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 23.6 °C, humidity dropped to 36 % and gusts hit 60 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 34, class 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.

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.
  • 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 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.