How long did the Arkharinsky District fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 15 April 2018 to 2 May 2018 (18 days). The perimeter dates it from 16 April 2018 to 2 May 2018.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 56,083 hectares (560.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Arkharinsky District (55,502 ha, 3.9 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 26.2 °C, humidity dropped to 7 % and gusts hit 66 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 28, 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 · 2018-04-15 → 2018-05-02

Arkharinsky District fire, 15 April 2018 Arkharinsky District

Out · last detection 2 May 2018, 04:00 UTC

The fire started on 15 April 2018 in Arkharinsky District, Russia, and satellites saw it burning for 18 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 56,083 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 16th largest in Amur Oblast since 2016 (of 535 with a page). Number 12 in Russia in 2018, of 540.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Arkharinsky District · 2016 Arkharinsky District · 2026 Arkharinsky District · 2024 Arkharinsky District · 2019

Burnt area: 56,083ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 18days; 15 Apr 2018 – 2 May 2018
Municipalities hit: 1; districts
Started on: 15 Apr; 2018
Heat detections: 2,345; in a single hotspot: 293 MW
Danger at start: 6; Low · FWI index
Average daily power: 1.8GW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 15 Apr2 May

Play back 2 May 2018

How it evolved, day by day

15 Apr 18 Apr 22 Apr 24 Apr 25 Apr 28 Apr 2 May

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

66km/h · peak gust

7%lowest humidity

It had gone 3 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.1 mm on 5 May.

This area had burned before

7% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 3,287 ha in 2016, 574 ha in 2017.

64 ha Arkharinsky District fire, October 2016 4,773 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 35% of the area of London (561 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

Arkharinsky District where it started

55,502 ha reached on 15 Apr

3.9 %

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 2020

Built-up area1.0 ha

Residents≈ 40

Inside the perimeter there were about 1.0 hectares of built-up land and about 40 residents (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)
15 Apr	12.3 °C	18 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Low 6
16 Apr	17.2 °C	15 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	Low 10
17 Apr	19.7 °C	27 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 12
18 Apr	17.2 °C	15 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 13
19 Apr	18.8 °C	20 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 13
20 Apr	18.2 °C	35 %	36 km/h	3.6 mm	Very low 1
21 Apr	12.5 °C	17 %	56 km/h	0.0 mm	Low 7
22 Apr	14.2 °C	14 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 12
23 Apr	21.3 °C	13 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 16
24 Apr	24.8 °C	7 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	High 21
25 Apr	26.2 °C	8 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
26 Apr	12.3 °C	15 %	66 km/h	0.9 mm	Moderate 20
27 Apr	12.9 °C	15 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 17
28 Apr	18.2 °C	16 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 17
29 Apr	10.0 °C	38 %	31 km/h	0.6 mm	Moderate 13
30 Apr	14.3 °C	15 %	47 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 19
1 May	15.0 °C	14 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 17
2 May	16.1 °C	17 %	29 km/h	0.2 mm	Moderate 20
3 May after	17.9 °C	11 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
4 May after	11.4 °C	28 %	31 km/h	0.3 mm	Moderate 18
5 May after	16.9 °C	29 %	42 km/h	1.1 mm	Moderate 13

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 8 Apr 2018

After · 9 May 2018

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.

Detections table · 2,345Every 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 Arkharinsky District fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 15 April 2018 to 2 May 2018 (18 days). The perimeter dates it from 16 April 2018 to 2 May 2018.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 56,083 hectares (560.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Arkharinsky District (55,502 ha, 3.9 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 26.2 °C, humidity dropped to 7 % and gusts hit 66 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 28, 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

25 October 2026 Start date: 16 April 2018 → 15 April 2018.

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

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?

Your connection to the fire (optional) Email (optional)

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; 4 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 16 April 2018 to 2 May 2018. 2,345 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 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