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SS · South Sudan · –

Aweil Centre fire, October 2026 Aweil Centre

Dying down · last detection 4 Nov 2026, 12:16 UTC

The fire started on 24 October 2026 in Aweil Centre, South Sudan, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,716 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 161 in South Sudan in 2026, of 218.

GWIS near-real-time perimeter, from the layer that changed in August 2025: this fire is not compared with fires from earlier years, because since then the GWIS layer gives more and larger perimeters.

Is it still active?

No detections since 4 Nov 2026, 12:16 UTC. That usually means no flame is visible from space any more, although hotspots may remain. Satellites pass a few times a day and cloud or smoke can hide the fire: a lack of detections is not an official extinction. Each country’s emergency service declares a fire contained or out.

Burnt area
5,716ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
12days
24 Oct 2026 – 4 Nov 2026
Municipalities hit
1
counties
Started on
24 Oct
2026
Heat detections
93
in a single hotspot: 0 MW
Average daily power
92MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 24 Oct4 Nov
4 Nov 2026

How it evolved, day by day

24 Oct 2026 · 19 MW · 3 25 Oct 2026 · 0 MW · 0 28 Oct 2026 · 99 MW · 19 29 Oct 2026 · 44 MW · 6 30 Oct 2026 · 0 MW · 0 31 Oct 2026 · 16 MW · 4 1 Nov 2026 · 6 MW · 2 2 Nov 2026 · 54 MW · 10 3 Nov 2026 · 122 MW · 16 4 Nov 2026 · 379 MW · 33
24 Oct 28 Oct 30 Oct 1 Nov 4 Nov

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

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 3.6% of the area of London (57 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
    5,751 ha
    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.

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 17 Oct 2026
After · 4 Nov 2026

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 · 0Every 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 24 October 2026 and 4 November 2026: 12 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 5,716 hectares (57.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Aweil Centre (5,751 ha, 0.5 %).
Is the Aweil Centre fire still active?
No fire detections since 4 Nov 2026, 12:16 UTC. A lack of detections is not an official extinction.
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

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. No Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.

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.