How long did the Aldansky Ulus fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 1 July 2024 and 14 July 2024: 14 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 8,315 hectares (83.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Aldansky Ulus (8,324 ha, 0.0 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 34.1 °C, humidity dropped to 28 % and gusts hit 52 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 36, class High.

Where does this data come from?

From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Russia (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

RU · Russia · 2024-07-01 → 2024-07-14

Aldansky Ulus fire, 1 July 2024 Aldansky Ulus

Out · last detection 9 Jul 2024, 04:28 UTC

The fire started on 1 July 2024 in Aldansky Ulus, Russia, and satellites saw it burning for 14 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 8,315 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 605th largest in Sakha Republic since 2016 (of 1422 with a page). Number 204 in Russia in 2024, of 558.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Aldansky Ulus · 2020 Aldansky Ulus · 2020 Aldansky Ulus · 2024 Aldansky Ulus · 2022

Burnt area: 8,315ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 14days; 1 Jul 2024 – 14 Jul 2024
Municipalities hit: 1; districts
Started on: 1 Jul; 2024
Heat detections: 426; in a single hotspot: 141 MW
Danger at start: 36; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 346MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Jul14 Jul

Play back 9 Jul 2024

How it evolved, day by day

1 Jul 4 Jul 6 Jul 8 Jul 9 Jul

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

The weather it burned in

34°high

52km/h · peak gust

28%lowest humidity

It had gone 9 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 6.3 mm on 15 Jul.

This area had burned before

2% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 138 ha in 2020.

138 ha Aldansky Ulus fire, October 2020 3,346 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 5.3% of the area of London (83 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

Aldansky Ulus where it started

8,324 ha

0.0 %

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 2025

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (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)
26 Jun	30.3 °C	29 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
27 Jun	22.2 °C	30 %	52 km/h	0.1 mm	High 36
28 Jun	15.2 °C	50 %	39 km/h	4.2 mm	Very low 4
29 Jun	19.8 °C	41 %	30 km/h	3.4 mm	Very low 3
30 Jun	25.7 °C	28 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 15
1 Jul	30.6 °C	29 %	41 km/h	0.2 mm	High 25
2 Jul	30.5 °C	47 %	40 km/h	0.9 mm	Moderate 18
3 Jul	34.1 °C	38 %	31 km/h	1.0 mm	Moderate 20
4 Jul	27.9 °C	30 %	34 km/h	1.4 mm	Moderate 17
5 Jul	22.8 °C	32 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	High 23
6 Jul	21.3 °C	40 %	25 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
7 Jul	23.1 °C	42 %	17 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 18
8 Jul	25.5 °C	37 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
9 Jul	24.4 °C	42 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
10 Jul	21.3 °C	64 %	22 km/h	0.9 mm	Low 9
11 Jul	26.0 °C	47 %	15 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 14
12 Jul	28.3 °C	42 %	18 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 17
13 Jul	32.0 °C	28 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
14 Jul	32.1 °C	32 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
15 Jul after	20.9 °C	63 %	20 km/h	6.3 mm	Very low 1

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 24 Jun 2024

After · 21 Jul 2024

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 15 July 2024 the air beside the fire reached 1,803 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 632: 42 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak1,803 µg/m³

Days over the guideline17 days

PM102,578 µg/m³

Optical depth7.55

WHO 15

29301234567891011121314151617

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 · 426Every 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 Russia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Aldansky Ulus fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 1 July 2024 and 14 July 2024: 14 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 8,315 hectares (83.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Aldansky Ulus (8,324 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 34.1 °C, humidity dropped to 28 % and gusts hit 52 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 36, class High.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Russia (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: 112 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

Satellite cross-check

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

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 do you think is wrong?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

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 112.

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. 426 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.

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 (Open Data Commons Open Database License 1.0). 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.

Where it burned