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Aweil Centre fire, 9 December 2020 Aweil Centre

Out · last detection 18 Dec 2020, 11:56 UTC

The fire started on 9 December 2020 in Aweil Centre, South Sudan, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,217 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 49th largest in Northern Bahr el Ghazal since 2016 (of 53 with a page). Number 183 in South Sudan in 2020, of 190.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Aweil Centre · 2017Raga · 2019Aweil Centre · 2016Aweil Centre · 2021

Burnt area
5,217ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
9days
9 Dec 2020 – 17 Dec 2020
Municipalities hit
1
counties
Started on
9 Dec
2020
Heat detections
183
in a single hotspot: 57 MW
Danger at start
44
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
114MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 9 Dec17 Dec
18 Dec 2020

How it evolved, day by day

9 Dec 2020 · 35 MW · 10 10 Dec 2020 · 12 MW · 5 11 Dec 2020 · 217 MW · 11 12 Dec 2020 · 57 MW · 13 13 Dec 2020 · 5 MW · 1 14 Dec 2020 · 192 MW · 24 15 Dec 2020 · 175 MW · 47 16 Dec 2020 · 394 MW · 33 17 Dec 2020 · 45 MW · 10 18 Dec 2020 · 6 MW · 2
9 Dec 11 Dec 13 Dec 15 Dec 16 Dec 17 Dec

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

The weather it burned in

37°high
35km/h · peak gust
11%lowest humidity

It had gone 36 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

91% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,982 ha in 2016, 4,131 ha in 2017, 3,150 ha in 2019. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 4,757 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 3.3% of the area of London (52 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

  1. Aweil Centre where it started
    5,248 ha reached on 5 Dec
    0.5 %

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 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)
9 Dec 36.2 °C 11 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
10 Dec 36.2 °C 12 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
11 Dec 36.7 °C 16 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
12 Dec 37.0 °C 14 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
13 Dec 37.3 °C 14 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
14 Dec 37.2 °C 13 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
15 Dec 37.1 °C 12 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
16 Dec 36.2 °C 11 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
17 Dec 34.8 °C 12 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
18 Dec after 34.4 °C 13 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
19 Dec after 34.4 °C 13 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
20 Dec after 34.9 °C 15 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
21 Dec after 35.4 °C 15 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
22 Dec after 36.0 °C 16 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
23 Dec after 36.9 °C 16 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
24 Dec after 36.0 °C 17 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
25 Dec after 36.8 °C 16 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
26 Dec after 35.4 °C 15 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
27 Dec after 36.0 °C 16 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 2 Dec 2020
After · 24 Dec 2020

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 · 183Every 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 timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

Other fires nearby

All fires in South Sudan ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Aweil Centre fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 9 December 2020 and 17 December 2020: 9 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 5,217 hectares (52.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Aweil Centre (5,248 ha, 0.5 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 37.3 °C, humidity dropped to 11 % and gusts hit 35 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 53, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of South Sudan (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.

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.

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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. 183 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 (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY 3.0 IGO)). 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.