How bad is the situation on the ground?

Bad, and worsening. Since September 2026, monitoring systems including FIRMS, the Global Fire Emissions Database, and NASA Worldview have recorded a sharp rise in fires and smoke across the central and eastern Amazon, stretching from the forests near Manaus and Santarém east toward the mouth of the Amazon River.

On October 12, 2026, MODIS aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured enormous smoke plumes rising from both sides of the Amazon River. Manaus, home to more than 2 million people, was engulfed. Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) — microscopic particles that penetrate deep into the lungs — exceeded 135 micrograms per cubic meter, placing the city's air in the second-worst category of a regional air quality index. Schools shut, public events were canceled, and children's sports leagues suspended activities.

Rainfall in Manaus ran 95 percent below normal in August and 60 percent below normal in September, according to Brazil's National Institute of Meteorology.

What does El Niño have to do with it?

Everything. El Niño shifts rainfall patterns over months, unlike a tornado that strikes in minutes, and this year it is driving what NASA scientist Douglas Morton calls a "cascade" of tropical fires.

The sequence starts near the equator, where drought ignites peat fires in Indonesia — blazes that burn carbon-rich organic material in soil. Dry conditions then push fire activity into the central and eastern Amazon. The same progression appeared after the 2015–2016 El Niño, documented in a 2017 study Morton co-authored with researchers from UC Irvine, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and the University of Maryland. It repeated in 2023. It's back in 2026.

"Now, in the Amazon, we're seeing the second domino in the cascade fall," Morton said, pointing to rising fire counts in the Brazilian states of Pará and Amazonas.

How did the fires start?

Nearly all of them were human-ignited. Lightning causes less than 1 percent of fires in the region because the rainforest is normally too wet, Morton said. Many of the larger blazes began as deliberately set land-management fires — clearing shrubs from pasture or crop residue from fields — before escaping into the parched understory. Extreme drought turned routine burns into runaway wildfires.

Satellite analysis suggests roughly 50 to 70 uncontrolled fires are burning in the Santarém area alone, according to Coffield.

What happens next?

Scientists expect fire activity to spread north in November and December 2026, threatening the Brazilian states of Roraima and Amapá, northern Pará, and parts of Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname. By August and September 2027, drought and fire danger could peak in the southern Amazon, including Brazil and Paraguay. Fires near Manaus and Santarém should ease when seasonal rains return, likely in December 2026 or January 2027.

There's a troubling wrinkle: many of the burning forests burned before. Trees scorched in 2015 and 2023 are weakened and more vulnerable, so today's fires may burn hotter than earlier ones. "It's so striking — and frustrating — that this is happening all over again," Morton said.

The findings are preliminary, drawn from ongoing analysis of candidate fires. But the warning is clear. As Morton put it: "Given the intensity of this El Niño, this really is the year for people to avoid burning at all costs."