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Pimenteiras do Oeste fire, September 2024 Pimenteiras do Oeste

Out · last detection 15 Oct 2024, 17:01 UTC

The fire started on 30 September 2024 in Pimenteiras do Oeste, Brazil, and satellites saw it burning for 16 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 3,358 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 249th largest in Rondônia since 2016 (of 300 with a page). Number 1124 in Brazil in 2024, of 1301.

Compare with…
Burnt area
3,358ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
16days
30 Sept 2024 – 15 Oct 2024
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
30 Sept
2024
Heat detections
153
in a single hotspot: 821 MW
Danger at start
12
Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power
675MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 30 Sept15 Oct
15 Oct 2024

How it evolved, day by day

3 Oct 2024 · 1 MW · 1 4 Oct 2024 · 33 MW · 3 5 Oct 2024 · 50 MW · 15 6 Oct 2024 · 1,536 MW · 25 7 Oct 2024 · 28 MW · 5 8 Oct 2024 · 2,460 MW · 20 9 Oct 2024 · 3,877 MW · 69 10 Oct 2024 · 10 MW · 1 11 Oct 2024 · 24 MW · 4 12 Oct 2024 · 18 MW · 2 13 Oct 2024 · 2 MW · 1 15 Oct 2024 · 63 MW · 7
3 Oct 5 Oct 7 Oct 9 Oct 11 Oct 13 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

38°high
38km/h · peak gust
30%lowest humidity

It had gone 52 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.0 mm on 16 Oct.

This area had burned before

75% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 160 ha in 2020, 2,500 ha in 2022. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 2,502 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 2.1% of the area of London (34 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. Pimenteiras do Oeste where it started
    2,612 ha reached on 3 Oct
    0.4 %

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)
30 Sept 35.1 °C 50 % 32 km/h 2.3 mm Moderate 12
1 Oct 37.0 °C 33 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
2 Oct 37.9 °C 32 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
3 Oct 34.1 °C 44 % 38 km/h 0.3 mm High 31
4 Oct 34.9 °C 40 % 28 km/h 0.2 mm High 28
5 Oct 37.2 °C 34 % 16 km/h 0.1 mm High 27
6 Oct 37.1 °C 37 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
7 Oct 35.5 °C 42 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
8 Oct 37.0 °C 38 % 36 km/h 0.1 mm High 31
9 Oct 37.0 °C 36 % 33 km/h 0.1 mm High 31
10 Oct 35.0 °C 41 % 37 km/h 0.1 mm High 32
11 Oct 37.5 °C 32 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
12 Oct 37.7 °C 33 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
13 Oct 38.4 °C 30 % 30 km/h 2.7 mm Moderate 21
14 Oct 35.8 °C 36 % 24 km/h 0.8 mm High 24
15 Oct 37.4 °C 35 % 24 km/h 0.4 mm High 29
16 Oct after 31.6 °C 58 % 30 km/h 2.0 mm Low 10

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 23 Sept 2024
After · 22 Oct 2024

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 5 October 2024 the air beside the fire reached 394 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 247: 16 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak394 µg/m³
Days over the guideline17 days
PM10562 µg/m³
Optical depth3.77
2829301234567891011121314
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 · 153Every 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 Pimenteiras do Oeste fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 30 September 2024 to 15 October 2024 (16 days). The perimeter dates it from 30 September 2024 to 11 October 2024.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 3,358 hectares (33.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Pimenteiras do Oeste (2,612 ha, 0.4 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 38.4 °C, humidity dropped to 30 % and gusts hit 38 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 11 October 2024 → 15 October 2024.

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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 30 September 2024 to 11 October 2024. 153 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.