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Vantage Highway Fire, August 2022 Kittitas

Out · last measured on 1 Aug 2022

The fire started on 1 August 2022 in Kittitas, United States, and satellites saw it burning for 1 day. United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) mapped an official burnt perimeter of 11,863 hectares, spread across a single county.

It is the 35th largest in Washington since 2016 (of 285 with a page). Number 52 in United States in 2022, of 493.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Milepost Twenty Two · 2018Boylston · 2018243 Command · 2019Yakima · 2017

We have the official perimeter (MTBS / NIFC) for this fire, but the VIIRS sensors did not capture it in enough detail: no day-by-day evolution, but the split by county is there.

Burnt area
11,863ha
official perimeter (MTBS / NIFC)
Duration
1day
1 Aug 2022 – 1 Aug 2022
Counties hit
1
counties
Started on
1 Aug
2022
Danger at start
60
Extreme · FWI index

Where it burned

The weather it burned in

36°high
56km/h · peak gust
20%lowest humidity

It had gone 28 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

17% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,027 ha in 2018.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 7.5% of the area of London (119 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. Kittitas where it started
    11,802 ha
    2.0 %

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 area0.31 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.31 hectares of 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)
1 Aug 35.9 °C 20 % 56 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
2 Aug after 34.0 °C 13 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
3 Aug after 36.5 °C 10 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
4 Aug after 27.3 °C 23 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
5 Aug after 28.3 °C 17 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
6 Aug after 32.3 °C 14 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
7 Aug after 35.8 °C 6 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
8 Aug after 39.2 °C 5 % 20 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
9 Aug after 34.8 °C 19 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
10 Aug after 36.1 °C 14 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
11 Aug after 34.6 °C 16 % 29 km/h 0.9 mm Very high 46

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 25 Jul 2022
After · 8 Aug 2022

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 4 August 2022 the air beside the fire reached 23 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak23 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1034 µg/m³
Optical depth0.35
4
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)

Other fires nearby

All fires in United States ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Vantage Highway Fire last?
It burned between 1 August 2022 and 1 August 2022: 1 day, according to the start date recorded by United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) and the heat detections seen by satellite.
How much area did it burn?
The official perimeter published by United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) is 11,863 hectares (118.6 km²). Other tallies, such as daily incident reports, may give slightly different figures.
Which counties burned?
The fire only entered Kittitas (11,802 ha, 2.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 35.9 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 56 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

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.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. No 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.