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Pitka Fire, July 2019 Yukon-Koyukuk

Out · last detection 26 Jul 2019, 20:24 UTC

The fire started on 15 July 2019 in Yukon-Koyukuk, United States, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) mapped an official burnt perimeter of 610 hectares, spread across a single county.

It is the 411th largest in Alaska since 2016 (of 472 with a page). Number 286 in United States in 2019, of 367.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Trail Creek · 2019

Burnt area
610ha
official perimeter (MTBS / NIFC)
Duration
≈ 12days
15 Jul 2019 – 26 Jul 2019
Counties hit
1
counties
Started on
15 Jul
2019
Heat detections
141
in a single hotspot: 41 MW
Danger at start
19
Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power
117MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 15 Jul26 Jul
26 Jul 2019

How it evolved, day by day

15 Jul 2019 · 13 MW · 3 16 Jul 2019 · 38 MW · 3 17 Jul 2019 · 194 MW · 12 18 Jul 2019 · 626 MW · 48 19 Jul 2019 · 21 MW · 7 20 Jul 2019 · 9 MW · 5 22 Jul 2019 · 189 MW · 28 23 Jul 2019 · 60 MW · 10 24 Jul 2019 · 123 MW · 22 25 Jul 2019 · 9 MW · 2 26 Jul 2019 · 7 MW · 1
15 Jul 17 Jul 18 Jul 19 Jul 22 Jul 24 Jul 26 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

24°high
56km/h · peak gust
33%lowest humidity

It had gone one day without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.9 mm on 27 Jul.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 0.4% of the area of London (6.1 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. Yukon-Koyukuk where it started
    645 ha reached on 15 Jul
    0.0 %

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 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)
15 Jul 22.6 °C 38 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
16 Jul 21.4 °C 35 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 21
17 Jul 23.2 °C 41 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 21
18 Jul 21.9 °C 33 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
19 Jul 17.6 °C 46 % 44 km/h 0.3 mm High 25
20 Jul 15.6 °C 57 % 56 km/h 0.3 mm High 25
21 Jul 17.8 °C 55 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
22 Jul 20.6 °C 43 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
23 Jul 24.3 °C 35 % 18 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
24 Jul 22.6 °C 42 % 34 km/h 0.3 mm High 24
25 Jul 19.5 °C 53 % 24 km/h 0.1 mm Moderate 19
26 Jul 15.5 °C 77 % 27 km/h 23.4 mm Very low 0
27 Jul after 16.2 °C 55 % 19 km/h 2.9 mm Very low 0

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 8 Jul 2019
After · 2 Aug 2019

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

Detections table · 141Every 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 Pitka Fire last?
The official perimeter only gives the start date (15 July 2019). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 26 July 2019 (12 days from 15 July 2019), 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 610 hectares (6.1 km²). Other tallies, such as daily incident reports, may give slightly different figures.
Which counties burned?
The fire only entered Yukon-Koyukuk (645 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 24.3 °C, humidity dropped to 33 % and gusts hit 56 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 27, class 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

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. 141 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 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.