Remington Fire, August 2024 Rosebud, Big Horn, Powder River
The fire started on 15 August 2024 in Big Horn, United States, and satellites saw it burning for 13 days. United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) mapped an official burnt perimeter of 77,888 hectares, spread across 5 counties.
It is the 2th largest in Montana since 2016 (of 302 with a page). Number 4 in United States in 2024, of 371.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 77,888ha
- official perimeter (MTBS / NIFC)
- Duration
- ≈ 13days
- 15 Aug 2024 – 27 Aug 2024
- Counties hit
- 5
- counties
- Started on
- 15 Aug
- 2024
- Heat detections
- 1,928
- in a single hotspot: 1,074 MW
- Danger at start
- 31
- High · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 6.7GW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.
This area had burned before
6% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 610 ha in 2016, 4,044 ha in 2017, 16 ha in 2020, 11 ha in 2022.
- 2,406 ha Deer Creek fire, August 2017 36,467 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 1,638 ha Lee Creek fire, July 2017 1,637 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 610 ha Griffin Gulch fire, September 2016 609 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 16 ha Seventy-Six fire, July 2020 406 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 11 ha Long Butte fire, August 2022 667 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each county
-
35,435 ha reached on 23 Aug2.7 %
-
Big Horn where it started24,539 ha reached on 15 Aug1.9 %
-
9,175 ha reached on 23 Aug1.1 %
-
8,087 ha reached on 22 Aug1.2 %
-
6 ha0.0 %
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 2025Inside the perimeter there were about 1.6 hectares of built-up land and about 20 residents (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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15 Aug | 29.1 °C | 23 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 31 |
| 16 Aug | 30.8 °C | 23 % | 35 km/h | 0.1 mm | Very high 42 |
| 17 Aug | 32.1 °C | 28 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 42 |
| 18 Aug | 33.3 °C | 26 % | 32 km/h | 1.1 mm | High 33 |
| 19 Aug | 29.4 °C | 42 % | 33 km/h | 2.5 mm | Moderate 12 |
| 20 Aug | 34.6 °C | 13 % | 39 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 21 Aug | 34.6 °C | 15 % | 45 km/h | 0.2 mm | Extreme 52 |
| 22 Aug | 31.5 °C | 19 % | 39 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 56 |
| 23 Aug | 35.9 °C | 13 % | 50 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 60 |
| 24 Aug | 35.2 °C | 10 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 56 |
| 25 Aug | 26.2 °C | 24 % | 59 km/h | 1.2 mm | Very high 44 |
| 26 Aug | 19.6 °C | 65 % | 32 km/h | 20.1 mm | Very low 0 |
| 27 Aug | 27.9 °C | 26 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 13 |
| 28 Aug after | 19.8 °C | 27 % | 63 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 34 |
| 29 Aug after | 24.6 °C | 28 % | 58 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 36 |
| 30 Aug after | 30.3 °C | 16 % | 21 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 31 |
| 31 Aug after | 28.8 °C | 23 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 36 |
| 1 Sept after | 33.7 °C | 16 % | 51 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 50 |
| 2 Sept after | 35.3 °C | 10 % | 28 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 45 |
| 3 Sept after | 30.9 °C | 19 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 48 |
| 4 Sept after | 25.8 °C | 33 % | 26 km/h | 0.5 mm | High 33 |
| 5 Sept after | 25.6 °C | 33 % | 32 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 32 |
| 6 Sept after | 28.2 °C | 26 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 29 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
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 · CopernicusOn 24 August 2024 the air beside the fire reached 166 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 56: 3.8 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
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 · 1,928Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 1,637 haLee Creek RosebudJuly 2017 · 4 days · 16 km away
- 36,467 haDeer Creek SheridanAugust 2017 · 4 days · 23 km away
- 7,751 haMcghee RosebudJuly 2024 · 13 days · 25 km away
- 10,439 haWaddle Creek SheridanAugust 2020 · 2 days · 31 km away
- 11,302 haWitten RosebudJuly 2017 · 7 days · 34 km away
- 2,434 haCoal Bank RosebudOctober 2021 · 2 days · 36 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Remington Fire last?
- The official perimeter only gives the start date (22 August 2024). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 27 August 2024 (13 days from 15 August 2024), 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 77,888 hectares (778.9 km²). Other tallies, such as daily incident reports, may give slightly different figures.
- Which counties burned?
- The fire entered 5 counties: Rosebud (35,435 ha, 2.7 %); Big Horn (24,539 ha, 1.9 %); Powder River (9,175 ha, 1.1 %); Sheridan (8,087 ha, 1.2 %); Campbell (6 ha, 0.0 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 35.9 °C, humidity dropped to 10 % and gusts hit 59 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 60, class 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 ›
- NIFC · National Interagency Fire Center ↗
- InciWeb · Incident Information System ↗
- MTBS · Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity ↗
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.
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
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. 1,928 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.
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.