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Oriximiná fire, 4 October 2022 Oriximiná

Out · last detection 9 Oct 2022, 17:25 UTC

The fire started on 4 October 2022 in Oriximiná, Brazil, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 20,404 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 93th largest in Pará since 2016 (of 1101 with a page). Number 32 in Brazil in 2022, of 687.

Compare with…
Burnt area
20,404ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
6days
4 Oct 2022 – 9 Oct 2022
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
4 Oct
2022
Heat detections
527
in a single hotspot: 63 MW
Danger at start
8
Low · FWI index
Average daily power
814MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 4 Oct9 Oct
9 Oct 2022

How it evolved, day by day

4 Oct 2022 · 115 MW · 4 5 Oct 2022 · 91 MW · 14 6 Oct 2022 · 972 MW · 63 7 Oct 2022 · 1,559 MW · 167 8 Oct 2022 · 1,024 MW · 179 9 Oct 2022 · 1,122 MW · 100
4 Oct 5 Oct 6 Oct 7 Oct 8 Oct 9 Oct

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

The weather it burned in

36°high
36km/h · peak gust
28%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 5.5 mm on 10 Oct.

This area had burned before

47% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 187 ha in 2016, 6,225 ha in 2017, 104 ha in 2018, 726 ha in 2019, 2,632 ha in 2020.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 13% of the area of London (204 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. Oriximiná 20,136 inhabitants where it started
    20,547 ha reached on 4 Oct
    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)
4 Oct 33.1 °C 49 % 26 km/h 1.8 mm Low 8
5 Oct 34.1 °C 37 % 32 km/h 0.1 mm High 22
6 Oct 35.3 °C 29 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
7 Oct 35.5 °C 28 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
8 Oct 35.2 °C 28 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
9 Oct 34.9 °C 35 % 35 km/h 0.1 mm High 34
10 Oct after 31.6 °C 53 % 37 km/h 5.5 mm Low 5

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 27 Sept 2022
After · 16 Oct 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 4 October 2022 the air beside the fire reached 239 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 106: 7.1 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak239 µg/m³
Days over the guideline10 days
PM10343 µg/m³
Optical depth0.73
23456789101112
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 · 527Every 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 Oriximiná fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 4 October 2022 and 9 October 2022: 6 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 20,404 hectares (204.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Oriximiná (20,547 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 35.5 °C, humidity dropped to 28 % and gusts hit 36 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 34, 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 · 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.

No changes since 24 October 2026.

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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 527 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.