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Matt Staff Rd Fire, August 2022 Lewis and Clark, Broadwater

Out · last detection 5 Aug 2022, 20:28 UTC

The fire started on 4 August 2022 in Lewis and Clark, United States, and satellites saw it burning for 2 days. United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) mapped an official burnt perimeter of 583 hectares, spread across 2 counties.

It is the 246th largest in Montana since 2016 (of 302 with a page). Number 412 in United States in 2022, of 493.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Coal Ridge · 2023Taylor · 2021Horse Gulch · 2024North Hills · 2019

Burnt area
583ha
official perimeter (MTBS / NIFC)
Duration
≈ 2days
4 Aug 2022 – 5 Aug 2022
Counties hit
2
counties
Started on
4 Aug
2022
Heat detections
15
in a single hotspot: 68 MW
Danger at start
71
Very extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
215MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 4 Aug5 Aug

How it evolved, day by day

5 Aug 2022 · 215 MW · 15

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
61km/h · peak gust
16%lowest humidity

It had gone 10 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.3 mm on 6 Aug.

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 0.4% of the area of London (5.8 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. Lewis and Clark where it started
    501 ha reached on 5 Aug
    0.1 %
  2. Broadwater
    74 ha reached on 5 Aug
    0.0 %

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 area0.13 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.13 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)

Started with Extreme FWI: 36 % of the area in United States Strong wind: 27 % of the area in United States

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
4 Aug 34.5 °C 16 % 61 km/h 0.1 mm Very extreme 71
5 Aug 28.8 °C 19 % 27 km/h 0.2 mm Very high 41
6 Aug after 21.4 °C 47 % 31 km/h 2.3 mm Low 11

Its twins: fires that started in the same weather

It started with an FWI of 71.4, a minimum humidity of 16% and 10 days without rain. Fires in the area that started in weather like this since 2016: 7.

FWI at the start 71.4
Minimum humidity 16 %
Days without rain 10
this fire chosen twins rest of the area
Almost identicalSimilar

Outlines of the closest twins

Coal Ridge Fire, August 2023
495 ha 1 day FWI 71.9 Min. humidity 14 % 226 km away, in 2023

First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: 1.1 mm on 30 Aug.

See its page Compare with this fire

What happened to them

Fires in the area that started in similar weather: 7. With fewer than 15 we give no figures: they would be more noise than signal.

This is a bank of analogues: it shows what usually happens, not what will happen. With fewer than 15 twins we give no figures. How we calculate it

How it ended

2.3 mmfirst rain
6 Augthe day after it ended
61km/h · max. gust

It was considered over on 5 Aug, and on 6 Aug 2.3 mm fell. We do not know whether the rain or the firefighters put it out.

Weather on this page: Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)

How a twin is chosen

  • Same area: fires that have already ended, less than 250 km from this one, since 2016.
  • Same start: we compare the FWI on the first day, the minimum humidity that day and the run of days without rain before it. The slider sets how much they may differ.
  • Only pages with final weather data (ERA5 reanalysis) calculated in the same way as this fire’s; agricultural and grass burns and pages with data under review are left out.
  • Fires burning at the same time as this one (a week before or after) are left out: they share the same spell of weather and do not count as a precedent.
  • They are sorted by similarity, and the outlines of the first five are drawn.

How we calculate it

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 28 Jul 2022
After · 12 Aug 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 6 August 2022 the air beside the fire reached 49 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 23: 1.5 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak49 µg/m³
Days over the guideline2 days
PM1070 µg/m³
Optical depth0.50
4567
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 · 15Every 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 Matt Staff Rd Fire last?
The official perimeter only gives the start date (4 August 2022). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 5 August 2022 (2 days from 4 August 2022), 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 583 hectares (5.8 km²). Other tallies, such as daily incident reports, may give slightly different figures.
Which counties burned?
The fire entered 2 counties: Lewis and Clark (501 ha, 0.1 %); Broadwater (74 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 34.5 °C, humidity dropped to 16 % and gusts hit 61 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 71, class Very extreme.
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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 4 August 2022 → 5 August 2022.

RSS Changes to this page With cross-checks and a citable version

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 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. 15 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.