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Horse Fire, October 2020 Yavapai

Out · last detection 21 Oct 2020, 20:19 UTC

The fire started on 15 October 2020 in Yavapai, United States, and satellites saw it burning for 7 days. United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) mapped an official burnt perimeter of 3,711 hectares, spread across a single county.

It is the 88th largest in Arizona since 2016 (of 380 with a page). Number 132 in United States in 2020, of 441.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Cellar · 2019Crooks · 2022Goodwin · 2017Tiger · 2021

Burnt area
3,711ha
official perimeter (MTBS / NIFC)
Duration
≈ 7days
15 Oct 2020 – 21 Oct 2020
Counties hit
1
counties
Started on
15 Oct
2020
Heat detections
279
in a single hotspot: 259 MW
Danger at start
49
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
1.2GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 15 Oct21 Oct
21 Oct 2020

How it evolved, day by day

15 Oct 2020 · 2,576 MW · 17 16 Oct 2020 · 3,193 MW · 121 17 Oct 2020 · 555 MW · 84 18 Oct 2020 · 926 MW · 22 19 Oct 2020 · 550 MW · 19 20 Oct 2020 · 323 MW · 13 21 Oct 2020 · 9 MW · 3
15 Oct 16 Oct 17 Oct 18 Oct 19 Oct 20 Oct 21 Oct

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

The weather it burned in

28°high
40km/h · peak gust
8%lowest humidity

It had gone 36 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 2.3% of the area of London (37 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. Yavapai where it started
    3,699 ha reached on 15 Oct
    0.2 %

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 area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable 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 Oct 28.4 °C 9 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
16 Oct 27.4 °C 8 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
17 Oct 25.8 °C 8 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
18 Oct 25.1 °C 9 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
19 Oct 25.2 °C 9 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
20 Oct 25.3 °C 10 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
21 Oct 23.9 °C 11 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
22 Oct after 22.4 °C 17 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
23 Oct after 21.5 °C 20 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
24 Oct after 19.9 °C 24 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
25 Oct after 18.5 °C 25 % 66 km/h 0.9 mm High 35
26 Oct after 9.9 °C 18 % 63 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
27 Oct after 10.4 °C 13 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
28 Oct after 14.7 °C 14 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
29 Oct after 19.2 °C 13 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
30 Oct after 20.2 °C 13 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
31 Oct after 21.4 °C 10 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 36

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 8 Oct 2020
After · 28 Oct 2020

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 · 279Every 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 Horse Fire last?
The official perimeter only gives the start date (15 October 2020). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 21 October 2020 (7 days from 15 October 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 3,711 hectares (37.1 km²). Other tallies, such as daily incident reports, may give slightly different figures.
Which counties burned?
The fire only entered Yavapai (3,699 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 28.4 °C, humidity dropped to 8 % and gusts hit 40 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 49, class Very 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. 279 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.