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Poconé fire, 9 September 2019 Poconé

Out · last detection 17 Sept 2019, 05:51 UTC

The fire started on 9 September 2019 in Poconé, Brazil, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 12,191 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 359th largest in Mato Grosso since 2016 (of 1996 with a page). Number 120 in Brazil in 2019, of 974.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Poconé · 2021Poconé · 2021Poconé · 2019Nossa Senhora do Livramento · 2019

Burnt area
12,191ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
9days
9 Sept 2019 – 17 Sept 2019
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
9 Sept
2019
Heat detections
620
in a single hotspot: 162 MW
Danger at start
45
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
768MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 9 Sept17 Sept
17 Sept 2019

How it evolved, day by day

9 Sept 2019 · 870 MW · 45 10 Sept 2019 · 2,151 MW · 102 11 Sept 2019 · 1,904 MW · 130 12 Sept 2019 · 739 MW · 137 13 Sept 2019 · 137 MW · 35 14 Sept 2019 · 375 MW · 75 15 Sept 2019 · 709 MW · 88 16 Sept 2019 · 14 MW · 2 17 Sept 2019 · 14 MW · 6
9 Sept 10 Sept 11 Sept 13 Sept 15 Sept 17 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

40°high
42km/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: 20.4 mm on 25 Sept.

This area had burned before

1% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 95 ha in 2018.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 7.7% of the area of London (122 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. Poconé 31,217 inhabitants where it started
    12,207 ha reached on 9 Sept
    0.7 %

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 2020
Built-up area2.5 ha
Residents≈ 200

Inside the perimeter there were about 2.5 hectares of built-up land and about 200 residents (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)
9 Sept 39.0 °C 27 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
10 Sept 38.7 °C 24 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
11 Sept 39.1 °C 26 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
12 Sept 34.2 °C 42 % 36 km/h 0.1 mm Very high 38
13 Sept 31.1 °C 51 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
14 Sept 37.1 °C 39 % 17 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
15 Sept 39.6 °C 29 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
16 Sept 40.2 °C 30 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
17 Sept 39.6 °C 29 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
18 Sept after 40.0 °C 29 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
19 Sept after 38.7 °C 34 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
20 Sept after 39.6 °C 34 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
21 Sept after 36.2 °C 43 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
22 Sept after 33.8 °C 45 % 26 km/h 0.3 mm High 30
23 Sept after 38.8 °C 39 % 26 km/h 0.2 mm High 29
24 Sept after 37.5 °C 42 % 21 km/h 0.2 mm High 32
25 Sept after 33.6 °C 56 % 36 km/h 20.4 mm Low 5

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 2 Sept 2019
After · 24 Sept 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 · 620Every 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 Poconé fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 9 September 2019 and 17 September 2019: 9 days between the first and last heat detection of the perimeter.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 12,191 hectares (121.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Poconé (12,207 ha, 0.7 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 40.2 °C, humidity dropped to 24 % and gusts hit 42 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 45, 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 ›

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
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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 620 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 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.