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Pilot Fire, July 2023 Yavapai, Mohave

Out · last detection 8 Jul 2023, 20:58 UTC

The fire started on 1 July 2023 in Yavapai, United States, and satellites saw it burning for 8 days. United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) mapped an official burnt perimeter of 12,106 hectares, spread across 2 counties.

It is the 23th largest in Arizona since 2016 (of 380 with a page). Number 15 in United States in 2023, of 305.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Happy · 2018Baca · 2016Adobe · 2022Pilot Knob · 2020

Burnt area
12,106ha
official perimeter (MTBS / NIFC)
Duration
≈ 8days
1 Jul 2023 – 8 Jul 2023
Counties hit
2
counties
Started on
1 Jul
2023
Heat detections
623
in a single hotspot: 341 MW
Danger at start
53
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
1.8GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Jul8 Jul
8 Jul 2023

How it evolved, day by day

1 Jul 2023 · 414 MW · 12 2 Jul 2023 · 15 MW · 7 3 Jul 2023 · 205 MW · 6 4 Jul 2023 · 7 MW · 4 5 Jul 2023 · 2,217 MW · 15 6 Jul 2023 · 7,193 MW · 240 7 Jul 2023 · 3,665 MW · 261 8 Jul 2023 · 789 MW · 78
1 Jul 3 Jul 5 Jul 6 Jul 7 Jul

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

The weather it burned in

35°high
63km/h · peak gust
4%lowest humidity

It had gone 42 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

13% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 561 ha in 2016, 671 ha in 2018, 31 ha in 2020, 302 ha in 2022.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 7.6% of the area of London (121 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. Yavapai where it started
    7,168 ha reached on 1 Jul
    0.3 %
  2. Mohave
    4,932 ha reached on 6 Jul
    0.1 %

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.

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)
1 Jul 33.6 °C 8 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
2 Jul 35.0 °C 6 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
3 Jul 34.1 °C 10 % 50 km/h 0.5 mm Extreme 67
4 Jul 31.3 °C 7 % 63 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 79
5 Jul 30.4 °C 5 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 71
6 Jul 31.5 °C 5 % 60 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 81
7 Jul 30.7 °C 5 % 59 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 77
8 Jul 31.6 °C 4 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 72
9 Jul after 31.1 °C 10 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 71
10 Jul after 31.0 °C 19 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
11 Jul after 31.4 °C 23 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
12 Jul after 32.1 °C 19 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
13 Jul after 33.5 °C 16 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
14 Jul after 35.1 °C 8 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
15 Jul after 38.1 °C 6 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
16 Jul after 35.3 °C 11 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
17 Jul after 34.5 °C 18 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
18 Jul after 34.8 °C 16 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 24 Jun 2023
After · 15 Jul 2023

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 2 July 2023 the air beside the fire reached 14 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak14 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1028 µg/m³
Optical depth0.30
29301234
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 · 623Every 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 Pilot Fire last?
The official perimeter only gives the start date (1 July 2023). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 8 July 2023 (8 days from 1 July 2023), 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 12,106 hectares (121.1 km²). Other tallies, such as daily incident reports, may give slightly different figures.
Which counties burned?
The fire entered 2 counties: Yavapai (7,168 ha, 0.3 %); Mohave (4,932 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 35.0 °C, humidity dropped to 4 % and gusts hit 63 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 81, 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 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
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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. 623 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.

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.