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Lábrea fire, 22 August 2022 Lábrea

Out · last detection 10 Sept 2022, 18:07 UTC

The fire started on 22 August 2022 in Lábrea, Brazil, and satellites saw it burning for 19 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,053 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 116th largest in Amazonas since 2016 (of 450 with a page). Number 230 in Brazil in 2022, of 687.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Lábrea · 2024Lábrea · 2021Lábrea · 2019Lábrea · 2020

Burnt area
6,053ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
19days
22 Aug 2022 – 9 Sept 2022
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
22 Aug
2022
Heat detections
490
in a single hotspot: 174 MW
Danger at start
19
Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power
396MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 22 Aug9 Sept
10 Sept 2022

How it evolved, day by day

24 Aug 2022 · 842 MW · 11 25 Aug 2022 · 1,176 MW · 46 26 Aug 2022 · 387 MW · 61 27 Aug 2022 · 2,114 MW · 127 28 Aug 2022 · 165 MW · 11 30 Aug 2022 · 150 MW · 35 31 Aug 2022 · 274 MW · 23 1 Sept 2022 · 520 MW · 33 2 Sept 2022 · 92 MW · 13 3 Sept 2022 · 140 MW · 22 4 Sept 2022 · 201 MW · 19 5 Sept 2022 · 254 MW · 38 6 Sept 2022 · 341 MW · 26 7 Sept 2022 · 46 MW · 9 8 Sept 2022 · 14 MW · 3 9 Sept 2022 · 14 MW · 11 10 Sept 2022 · 7 MW · 2
24 Aug 27 Aug 31 Aug 3 Sept 6 Sept 9 Sept

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

The weather it burned in

37°high
41km/h · peak gust
25%lowest humidity

It had gone 2 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 6.8 mm on 11 Sept.

This area had burned before

17% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,031 ha in 2021.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 3.8% of the area of London (61 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. Lábrea 45,448 inhabitants where it started
    6,103 ha reached on 24 Aug
    0.1 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance is from the town centre to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.

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)
22 Aug 33.7 °C 32 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
23 Aug 34.8 °C 31 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
24 Aug 35.7 °C 28 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
25 Aug 35.1 °C 32 % 16 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
26 Aug 33.8 °C 46 % 23 km/h 0.6 mm Moderate 17
27 Aug 34.5 °C 45 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
28 Aug 31.4 °C 57 % 26 km/h 7.6 mm Very low 2
29 Aug 30.0 °C 43 % 41 km/h 0.1 mm Low 9
30 Aug 33.2 °C 34 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
31 Aug 34.2 °C 36 % 15 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 17
1 Sept 36.2 °C 32 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
2 Sept 36.2 °C 33 % 19 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
3 Sept 34.8 °C 39 % 29 km/h 0.1 mm High 23
4 Sept 33.9 °C 34 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
5 Sept 34.7 °C 29 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
6 Sept 36.0 °C 25 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
7 Sept 35.9 °C 32 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
8 Sept 36.7 °C 35 % 34 km/h 0.1 mm High 29
9 Sept 36.5 °C 39 % 26 km/h 0.1 mm High 27
10 Sept after 35.9 °C 43 % 20 km/h 0.2 mm High 24
11 Sept after 30.3 °C 57 % 24 km/h 6.8 mm Very low 2

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 15 Aug 2022
After · 16 Sept 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 26 August 2022 the air beside the fire reached 1,628 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 863: 58 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak1,628 µg/m³
Days over the guideline24 days
PM102,325 µg/m³
Optical depth5.31
202122232425262728293031123456789101112
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 · 490Every 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 Lábrea fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 22 August 2022 and 9 September 2022: 19 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 6,053 hectares (60.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Lábrea (6,103 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 36.7 °C, humidity dropped to 25 % and gusts hit 41 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 30, class 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

Satellite cross-check

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. 490 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.

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.