How long did the Luchazes fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 5 September 2022 to 22 September 2022 (18 days). The perimeter dates it from 5 September 2022 to 16 September 2022.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,634 hectares (66.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Luchazes (6,680 ha, 0.2 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 33.7 °C, humidity dropped to 12 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 52, class Extreme.

Where does this data come from?

From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Angola (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

AO · Angola · 2022-09-05 → 2022-09-22

Luchazes fire, 5 September 2022 Luchazes

Out · last detection 22 Sept 2022, 12:35 UTC

The fire started on 5 September 2022 in Luchazes, Angola, and satellites saw it burning for 18 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,634 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 47th largest in Moxico since 2016 (of 108 with a page). Number 69 in Angola in 2022, of 143.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Luchazes · 2018 Luchazes · 2019 Luchazes · 2024 Luchazes · 2017

Burnt area: 6,634ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 18days; 5 Sept 2022 – 22 Sept 2022
Municipalities hit: 1; municipalities
Started on: 5 Sept; 2022
Heat detections: 227; in a single hotspot: 132 MW
Danger at start: 40; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 261MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 5 Sept22 Sept

Play back 22 Sept 2022

How it evolved, day by day

5 Sept 6 Sept 7 Sept 9 Sept 11 Sept 13 Sept 15 Sept 19 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

34°high

48km/h · peak gust

12%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

48% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 811 ha in 2016, 365 ha in 2017, 1,532 ha in 2018, 508 ha in 2019, 694 ha in 2020, 214 ha in 2021. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 3,164 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 4.2% of the area of London (66 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

Luchazes where it started

6,680 ha reached on 5 Sept

0.2 %

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)
5 Sept	32.6 °C	24 %	25 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
6 Sept	33.7 °C	14 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 50
7 Sept	33.3 °C	14 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
8 Sept	31.8 °C	12 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
9 Sept	31.2 °C	16 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 50
10 Sept	31.8 °C	12 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
11 Sept	32.7 °C	12 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
12 Sept	33.0 °C	12 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 46
13 Sept	33.1 °C	14 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 49
14 Sept	31.6 °C	20 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 52
15 Sept	30.8 °C	15 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
16 Sept	30.2 °C	17 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
17 Sept	31.8 °C	15 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 44
18 Sept	34.0 °C	13 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 49
19 Sept	32.2 °C	26 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 44
20 Sept	32.2 °C	26 %	23 km/h	0.2 mm	Very high 40
21 Sept	30.8 °C	20 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
22 Sept	32.0 °C	12 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 46
23 Sept after	33.8 °C	16 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 51
24 Sept after	34.6 °C	14 %	49 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
25 Sept after	32.9 °C	17 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
26 Sept after	32.5 °C	19 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 29 Aug 2022

After · 29 Sept 2022

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.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 12 September 2022 the air beside the fire reached 92 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 60: 4.0 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak92 µg/m³

Days over the guideline23 days

PM10132 µg/m³

Optical depth1.23

WHO 15

345678910111213141516171819202122232425

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 · 227Every 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 Angola ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Luchazes fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 5 September 2022 to 22 September 2022 (18 days). The perimeter dates it from 5 September 2022 to 16 September 2022.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,634 hectares (66.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Luchazes (6,680 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 33.7 °C, humidity dropped to 12 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 52, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Angola (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.

Satellite cross-check

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

26 October 2026 Last day with fire: 16 September 2022 → 22 September 2022.

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.

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What do you think is wrong?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

What really happened?

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How we know this

Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 5 September 2022 to 16 September 2022. 227 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 (Public Domain). 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.

Where it burned