How long did the Sheephead Fire last?

The official perimeter only gives the start date (8 September 2022). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 8 September 2022 (1 day from 8 September 2022), 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 605 hectares (6.0 km²). Other tallies, such as daily incident reports, may give slightly different figures.

Which counties burned?

The fire only entered Malheur (607 ha, 0.0 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 26.0 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 43 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.

US · United States · 2022-09-08 → 2022-09-08

Sheephead Fire, September 2022 Malheur

Out · last detection 8 Sept 2022, 20:41 UTC

The fire started on 8 September 2022 in Malheur, United States, and satellites saw it burning for 1 day. United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) mapped an official burnt perimeter of 605 hectares, spread across a single county.

It is the 279th largest in Oregon since 2016 (of 327 with a page). Number 403 in United States in 2022, of 493.

The power measured by the satellite is low (6.1 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Cherry Road · 2016 River · 2024 Leslie Gulch · 2020 Jump · 2024

Burnt area: 605ha; official perimeter (MTBS / NIFC)
Duration: ≈ 1day; 8 Sept 2022 – 8 Sept 2022
Counties hit: 1; counties
Started on: 8 Sept; 2022
Heat detections: 1; in a single hotspot: 6 MW
Danger at start: 60; Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power: 6MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 8 Sept8 Sept

How it evolved, day by day

8 Sept 2022 · 6 MW · 1

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

The weather it burned in

26°high

43km/h · peak gust

9%lowest humidity

It had gone 27 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.3 mm on 15 Sept.

This area had burned before

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

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 0.4% of the area of London (6.0 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

Malheur where it started

607 ha reached on 8 Sept

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)
8 Sept	26.0 °C	9 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 60
9 Sept after	22.6 °C	11 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 49
10 Sept after	25.9 °C	10 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 51
11 Sept after	27.3 °C	12 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
12 Sept after	23.7 °C	16 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 41
13 Sept after	22.3 °C	30 %	23 km/h	0.2 mm	Very high 39
14 Sept after	23.0 °C	31 %	22 km/h	0.0 mm	High 29
15 Sept after	20.5 °C	38 %	27 km/h	1.3 mm	Moderate 15

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 1 Sept 2022

After · 15 Sept 2022

Before After

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 10 September 2022 the air beside the fire reached 38 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 28: 1.8 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak38 µg/m³

Days over the guideline3 days

PM1054 µg/m³

Optical depth0.40

WHO 15

67891011

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 · 1Every 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 time	Satellite	FRP (MW)	Lat	Lon

Other fires nearby

All fires in United States ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Sheephead Fire last?: The official perimeter only gives the start date (8 September 2022). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 8 September 2022 (1 day from 8 September 2022), 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 605 hectares (6.0 km²). Other tallies, such as daily incident reports, may give slightly different figures.
Which counties burned?: The fire only entered Malheur (607 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 26.0 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 43 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 ›

Satellite cross-check

NASA FIRMS ↗
NIFC · Fire maps ↗

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.

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What really happened?

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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. One Suomi-NPP VIIRS detection 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.

Where it burned