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Itaituba fire, July 2020 Itaituba

Out · last detection 7 Aug 2020, 16:51 UTC

The fire started on 31 July 2020 in Itaituba, Brazil, and satellites saw it burning for 7 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 3,831 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 756th largest in Pará since 2016 (of 1096 with a page). Number 686 in Brazil in 2020, of 957.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Itaituba · 2026Itaituba · 2024Altamira · 2021Altamira · 2023

Burnt area
3,831ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
7days
31 Jul 2020 – 6 Aug 2020
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
31 Jul
2020
Heat detections
256
in a single hotspot: 259 MW
Danger at start
39
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
668MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 31 Jul6 Aug
7 Aug 2020

How it evolved, day by day

31 Jul 2020 · 3,136 MW · 33 1 Aug 2020 · 1,410 MW · 121 2 Aug 2020 · 527 MW · 65 3 Aug 2020 · 11 MW · 2 4 Aug 2020 · 28 MW · 10 5 Aug 2020 · 30 MW · 4 6 Aug 2020 · 79 MW · 8 7 Aug 2020 · 126 MW · 8
31 Jul 2 Aug 4 Aug 6 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

34°high
41km/h · peak gust
28%lowest humidity

It had gone 48 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

31% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,177 ha in 2019.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 2.4% of the area of London (38 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. Itaituba 123,314 inhabitants where it started
    3,858 ha reached on 31 Jul
    0.1 %

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 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)
31 Jul 34.4 °C 29 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
1 Aug 32.8 °C 28 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
2 Aug 32.3 °C 34 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
3 Aug 33.0 °C 34 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
4 Aug 33.6 °C 33 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
5 Aug 32.9 °C 33 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
6 Aug 32.3 °C 33 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
7 Aug after 32.4 °C 34 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
8 Aug after 32.3 °C 33 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
9 Aug after 32.5 °C 34 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
10 Aug after 33.8 °C 33 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
11 Aug after 33.3 °C 36 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
12 Aug after 32.5 °C 43 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
13 Aug after 35.0 °C 35 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
14 Aug after 34.4 °C 33 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
15 Aug after 34.7 °C 34 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
16 Aug after 34.6 °C 33 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
17 Aug after 35.8 °C 29 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
18 Aug after 35.3 °C 30 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
19 Aug after 35.4 °C 31 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
20 Aug after 34.9 °C 32 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 35

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 24 Jul 2020
After · 13 Aug 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 · 256Every 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 Brazil ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Itaituba fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 31 July 2020 and 6 August 2020: 7 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 3,831 hectares (38.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Itaituba (3,858 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 34.4 °C, humidity dropped to 28 % and gusts hit 41 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 Brazil (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: 193 · 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 193.

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. 256 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 ADM2 (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY 3.0 IGO)). 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.