How long did the Parauapebas fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 27 August 2024 to 30 September 2024 (35 days). The perimeter dates it from 27 August 2024 to 29 September 2024.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 43,005 hectares (430.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire entered 2 municipalities: Parauapebas (39,952 ha, 5.8 %); Marabá (3,341 ha, 0.2 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 35.9 °C, humidity dropped to 24 % and gusts hit 44 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 38, 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.

BR · Brazil · 2024-08-27 → 2024-09-30

Parauapebas fire, 27 August 2024 Parauapebas, Marabá

Out · last detection 30 Sept 2024, 16:44 UTC

The fire started on 27 August 2024 in Parauapebas, Brazil, and satellites saw it burning for 35 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 43,005 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 39th largest in Pará since 2016 (of 1096 with a page). Number 65 in Brazil in 2024, of 1301.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Parauapebas · 2017 São Félix do Xingu · 2017 Parauapebas · 2017 Parauapebas · 2024

Burnt area: 43,005ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 35days; 27 Aug 2024 – 30 Sept 2024
Municipalities hit: 2; municipalities
Started on: 27 Aug; 2024
Heat detections: 2,446; in a single hotspot: 173 MW
Danger at start: 30; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 512MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 27 Aug30 Sept

Play back 30 Sept 2024

How it evolved, day by day

27 Aug 1 Sept 6 Sept 7 Sept 11 Sept 16 Sept 21 Sept 28 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

36°high

44km/h · peak gust

24%lowest humidity

It had gone 12 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.6 mm on 1 Oct.

This area had burned before

13% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 5,474 ha in 2017, 945 ha in 2020. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 5,481 ha that had burned before.

4,465 ha Parauapebas fire, September 2017 9,200 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 27% of the area of London (430 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

Parauapebas 267,836 inhabitants where it started

39,952 ha reached on 27 Aug

5.8 %
Marabá 266,533 inhabitants

3,341 ha reached on 15 Sept

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 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)

Day	High	Min. humidity	Peak gust	Rain	Danger (FWI)
27 Aug	34.0 °C	37 %	22 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
28 Aug	32.2 °C	43 %	33 km/h	0.1 mm	High 30
29 Aug	33.8 °C	26 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
30 Aug	33.9 °C	31 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
31 Aug	34.5 °C	29 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
1 Sept	34.8 °C	25 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
2 Sept	35.3 °C	27 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
3 Sept	35.2 °C	26 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
4 Sept	35.9 °C	24 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
5 Sept	35.8 °C	29 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
6 Sept	34.8 °C	31 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 38
7 Sept	35.8 °C	26 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
8 Sept	33.7 °C	35 %	29 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
9 Sept	34.0 °C	34 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
10 Sept	34.8 °C	31 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
11 Sept	34.8 °C	33 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
12 Sept	34.9 °C	32 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
13 Sept	33.8 °C	38 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
14 Sept	34.2 °C	34 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
15 Sept	34.8 °C	31 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
16 Sept	35.1 °C	33 %	29 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
17 Sept	35.5 °C	31 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
18 Sept	34.6 °C	38 %	33 km/h	0.1 mm	High 35
19 Sept	33.4 °C	39 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
20 Sept	34.0 °C	39 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
21 Sept	35.0 °C	37 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
22 Sept	35.4 °C	32 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
23 Sept	35.3 °C	34 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
24 Sept	32.8 °C	45 %	31 km/h	0.6 mm	High 27
25 Sept	33.9 °C	45 %	31 km/h	1.0 mm	Moderate 21
26 Sept	34.0 °C	42 %	30 km/h	0.4 mm	High 24
27 Sept	34.5 °C	43 %	26 km/h	2.4 mm	Moderate 12
28 Sept	34.3 °C	42 %	26 km/h	0.1 mm	High 22
29 Sept	35.0 °C	40 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	High 24
30 Sept	32.5 °C	47 %	30 km/h	5.5 mm	Low 6
1 Oct after	31.5 °C	50 %	24 km/h	2.6 mm	Very low 5

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 20 Aug 2024

After · 7 Oct 2024

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 27 August 2024 the air beside the fire reached 72 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 46: 3.1 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak72 µg/m³

Days over the guideline36 days

PM10104 µg/m³

Optical depth1.19

WHO 15

19202122232425262728293031123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930123

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 · 2,446Every 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 Brazil ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Parauapebas fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 27 August 2024 to 30 September 2024 (35 days). The perimeter dates it from 27 August 2024 to 29 September 2024.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 43,005 hectares (430.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire entered 2 municipalities: Parauapebas (39,952 ha, 5.8 %); Marabá (3,341 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 35.9 °C, humidity dropped to 24 % and gusts hit 44 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 38, 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 ›

INPE · Programa Queimadas ↗
IBAMA · Prevfogo ↗

Satellite cross-check

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

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?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

What really happened?

Your connection to the fire (optional) Email (optional)

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 27 August 2024 to 29 September 2024. 2,446 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.

Where it burned