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Marcelândia fire, August 2019 Marcelândia

Out · last detection 25 Sept 2019, 17:34 UTC

The fire started on 24 August 2019 in Marcelândia, Brazil, and satellites saw it burning for 33 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 14,321 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 291th largest in Mato Grosso since 2016 (of 1996 with a page). Number 96 in Brazil in 2019, of 974.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Marcelândia · 2017Marcelândia · 2022Marcelândia · 2024Marcelândia · 2017

Burnt area
14,321ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
33days
24 Aug 2019 – 25 Sept 2019
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
24 Aug
2019
Heat detections
1,214
in a single hotspot: 427 MW
Danger at start
34
High · FWI index
Average daily power
503MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 24 Aug25 Sept
25 Sept 2019

How it evolved, day by day

24 Aug 2019 · 61 MW · 4 26 Aug 2019 · 26 MW · 3 27 Aug 2019 · 64 MW · 3 28 Aug 2019 · 10 MW · 2 29 Aug 2019 · 4 MW · 3 30 Aug 2019 · 200 MW · 22 31 Aug 2019 · 57 MW · 19 1 Sept 2019 · 404 MW · 18 2 Sept 2019 · 270 MW · 13 3 Sept 2019 · 192 MW · 41 4 Sept 2019 · 7,382 MW · 144 5 Sept 2019 · 855 MW · 152 6 Sept 2019 · 49 MW · 20 7 Sept 2019 · 50 MW · 10 8 Sept 2019 · 1,428 MW · 77 9 Sept 2019 · 1,613 MW · 158 10 Sept 2019 · 1,001 MW · 142 11 Sept 2019 · 349 MW · 32 12 Sept 2019 · 155 MW · 15 13 Sept 2019 · 131 MW · 22 14 Sept 2019 · 74 MW · 28 15 Sept 2019 · 70 MW · 26 16 Sept 2019 · 191 MW · 28 17 Sept 2019 · 169 MW · 20 18 Sept 2019 · 62 MW · 22 19 Sept 2019 · 70 MW · 20 20 Sept 2019 · 152 MW · 53 21 Sept 2019 · 372 MW · 70 22 Sept 2019 · 29 MW · 3 24 Sept 2019 · 11 MW · 5 25 Sept 2019 · 83 MW · 39
24 Aug 30 Aug 4 Sept 9 Sept 14 Sept 19 Sept 25 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

38°high
38km/h · peak gust
20%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 8.7 mm on 26 Sept.

This area had burned before

41% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 5,836 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 9% of the area of London (143 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. Marcelândia 11,396 inhabitants where it started
    14,408 ha reached on 24 Aug
    1.2 %

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 area0.34 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.34 hectares of 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)
24 Aug 34.8 °C 33 % 29 km/h 0.1 mm High 34
25 Aug 34.0 °C 33 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
26 Aug 34.3 °C 27 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
27 Aug 35.2 °C 24 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
28 Aug 35.4 °C 25 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
29 Aug 35.4 °C 25 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
30 Aug 35.1 °C 27 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
31 Aug 35.7 °C 24 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
1 Sept 36.1 °C 26 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
2 Sept 37.0 °C 26 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
3 Sept 36.7 °C 26 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
4 Sept 38.0 °C 20 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
5 Sept 37.4 °C 25 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
6 Sept 36.5 °C 30 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
7 Sept 35.4 °C 27 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
8 Sept 36.3 °C 23 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
9 Sept 36.8 °C 23 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
10 Sept 36.6 °C 23 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
11 Sept 38.0 °C 22 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
12 Sept 36.9 °C 26 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
13 Sept 38.0 °C 23 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
14 Sept 37.3 °C 24 % 20 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
15 Sept 36.3 °C 27 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
16 Sept 37.2 °C 28 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
17 Sept 36.3 °C 25 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
18 Sept 35.3 °C 30 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
19 Sept 36.2 °C 33 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
20 Sept 37.5 °C 31 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
21 Sept 36.0 °C 41 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
22 Sept 36.6 °C 36 % 22 km/h 0.2 mm High 32
23 Sept 36.8 °C 35 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
24 Sept 36.1 °C 35 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
25 Sept 36.7 °C 35 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
26 Sept after 32.9 °C 53 % 27 km/h 8.7 mm Low 6

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 17 Aug 2019
After · 2 Oct 2019

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 · 1,214Every 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 Marcelândia fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 24 August 2019 to 25 September 2019 (33 days). The perimeter dates it from 30 August 2019 to 25 September 2019.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 14,321 hectares (143.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Marcelândia (14,408 ha, 1.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 38.0 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 38 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 42, 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Start date: 30 August 2019 → 24 August 2019.

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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 30 August 2019 to 25 September 2019. 1,214 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.