How long did the Palisades Fire last?

The official perimeter only gives the start date (7 January 2025). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 12 January 2025 (12 days from 1 January 2025), 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 9,489 hectares (94.9 km²). Other tallies, such as daily incident reports, may give slightly different figures.

Which counties burned?

The fire only entered Los Angeles (9,767 ha, 0.9 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 20.7 °C, humidity dropped to 12 % and gusts hit 57 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 39, class Very high.

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.

US · United States · 2025-01-01 → 2025-01-12

Palisades Fire, January 2025 Los Angeles

Out · last detection 12 Jan 2025, 09:51 UTC

The fire started on 1 January 2025 in Los Angeles, United States, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) mapped an official burnt perimeter of 9,489 hectares, spread across a single county.

It is the 95th largest in California since 2016 (of 442 with a page). Number 39 in United States in 2025, of 327.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Palisades · 2021 Saddleridge · 2019 La Tuna · 2017 Creek · 2017

Burnt area: 9,489ha; official perimeter (MTBS / NIFC)
Duration: ≈ 12days; 1 Jan 2025 – 12 Jan 2025
Counties hit: 1; counties
Started on: 1 Jan; 2025
Heat detections: 1,059; in a single hotspot: 530 MW
Danger at start: 14; Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power: 5.6GW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Jan12 Jan

Play back 12 Jan 2025

How it evolved, day by day

1 Jan 7 Jan 8 Jan 9 Jan 10 Jan 11 Jan 12 Jan

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

The weather it burned in

21°high

57km/h · peak gust

12%lowest humidity

It had gone 36 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

2% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 191 ha in 2021.

191 ha Palisades fire, May 2021 554 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 6% of the area of London (95 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

Los Angeles where it started

9,767 ha reached on 1 Jan

0.9 %

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 2025

Built-up area424 ha

Residents≈ 24,000

Inside the perimeter there were about 424 hectares of built-up land and about 24,000 residents (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)

Day	High	Min. humidity	Peak gust	Danger (FWI)
1 Jan	18.0 °C	32 %	23 km/h	Moderate 14
2 Jan	20.7 °C	18 %	18 km/h	Moderate 20
3 Jan	15.8 °C	49 %	19 km/h	Moderate 15
4 Jan	15.9 °C	42 %	19 km/h	Moderate 14
5 Jan	20.1 °C	20 %	23 km/h	Moderate 21
6 Jan	19.4 °C	24 %	19 km/h	Moderate 20
7 Jan	18.6 °C	16 %	52 km/h	High 36
8 Jan	18.9 °C	14 %	57 km/h	Very high 39
9 Jan	19.9 °C	12 %	22 km/h	High 27
10 Jan	19.1 °C	14 %	28 km/h	High 27
11 Jan	17.6 °C	17 %	28 km/h	High 30
12 Jan	16.8 °C	18 %	27 km/h	High 30
13 Jan after	16.5 °C	18 %	36 km/h	High 33
14 Jan after	17.0 °C	19 %	23 km/h	High 28
15 Jan after	19.1 °C	15 %	23 km/h	High 28
16 Jan after	16.3 °C	24 %	30 km/h	High 27
17 Jan after	13.3 °C	54 %	23 km/h	Moderate 16
18 Jan after	14.0 °C	54 %	28 km/h	Moderate 15
19 Jan after	13.0 °C	57 %	28 km/h	Moderate 14
20 Jan after	17.3 °C	14 %	29 km/h	High 24
21 Jan after	18.4 °C	15 %	26 km/h	High 29
22 Jan after	21.8 °C	8 %	24 km/h	High 34

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 25 Dec 2024

After · 19 Jan 2025

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 10 January 2025 the air beside the fire reached 329 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 142: 9.4 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak329 µg/m³

Days over the guideline14 days

PM10335 µg/m³

Optical depth0.92

WHO 15

3031123456789101112131415

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 · 1,059Every 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 United States ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Palisades Fire last?: The official perimeter only gives the start date (7 January 2025). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 12 January 2025 (12 days from 1 January 2025), 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 9,489 hectares (94.9 km²). Other tallies, such as daily incident reports, may give slightly different figures.
Which counties burned?: The fire only entered Los Angeles (9,767 ha, 0.9 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 20.7 °C, humidity dropped to 12 % and gusts hit 57 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 39, class Very high.
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

NASA FIRMS ↗
NIFC · Fire maps ↗

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.

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What really happened?

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How we know this

Perimeter: NIFC WFIGS (United States), 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. 1,059 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 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.

Where it burned