Skip to content
worldfires
BR · Brazil · –

Nova Nazaré fire, 21 September 2026 Nova Nazaré

Out · last detection 24 Sept 2026, 17:20 UTC

The fire started on 21 September 2026 in Nova Nazaré, Brazil, and satellites saw it burning for 4 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 3,469 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 623 in Brazil in 2026, of 775.

GWIS near-real-time perimeter, from the layer that changed in October 2025: this fire is not compared with fires from earlier years, because since then the GWIS layer gives more and larger perimeters.

Burnt area
3,469ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
4days
21 Sept 2026 – 24 Sept 2026
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
21 Sept
2026
Heat detections
67
in a single hotspot: 50 MW
Danger at start
52
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
374MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 21 Sept24 Sept
24 Sept 2026

How it evolved, day by day

22 Sept 2026 · 1,027 MW · 57 23 Sept 2026 · 27 MW · 4 24 Sept 2026 · 69 MW · 6
22 Sept 23 Sept 24 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

39°high
46km/h · peak gust
19%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 4.4 mm on 2 Oct.

This area had burned before

55% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 33 ha in 2016, 1,922 ha in 2020, 15 ha in 2023.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 2.2% of the area of London (35 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. Nova Nazaré where it started
    3,485 ha reached on 22 Sept
    0.9 %

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 2025
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2025, 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. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.

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 60 days without rain: 55 % of the area in Brazil

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
21 Sept 38.5 °C 19 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
22 Sept 38.6 °C 26 % 46 km/h 0.1 mm Extreme 57
23 Sept 34.6 °C 39 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
24 Sept 38.3 °C 29 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
25 Sept after 39.0 °C 25 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
26 Sept after 37.2 °C 32 % 20 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
27 Sept after 39.2 °C 27 % 23 km/h 0.4 mm Very high 41
28 Sept after 40.5 °C 21 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
29 Sept after 39.4 °C 28 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
30 Sept after 38.5 °C 26 % 19 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
1 Oct after 38.0 °C 29 % 25 km/h 0.1 mm Very high 43
2 Oct after 27.0 °C 64 % 27 km/h 4.4 mm Low 6

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 14 Sept 2026
After · 1 Oct 2026

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 22 September 2026 the air beside the fire reached 37 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 24: 1.6 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak37 µg/m³
Days over the guideline6 days
PM1039 µg/m³
Optical depth0.74
19 Sept21 Sept23 Sept25 Sept27 Sept
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 · 67Every 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 Nova Nazaré fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 21 September 2026 and 24 September 2026: 4 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 3,469 hectares (34.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Nova Nazaré (3,485 ha, 0.9 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 38.6 °C, humidity dropped to 19 % and gusts hit 46 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 57, class Extreme.
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.

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. 67 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 2025, 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.