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KZ · Kazakhstan · –

Ayagozskiy fire, September 2026 Ayagozskiy

Out · last detection 12 Sept 2026, 07:54 UTC

The fire started on 11 September 2026 in Ayagozskiy, Kazakhstan, and satellites saw it burning for 4 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 3,687 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 34 in Kazakhstan in 2026, of 52.

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

Burnt area
3,687ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
4days
11 Sept 2026 – 14 Sept 2026
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
11 Sept
2026
Heat detections
77
in a single hotspot: 81 MW
Danger at start
37
High · FWI index
Average daily power
820MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 11 Sept14 Sept
12 Sept 2026

How it evolved, day by day

11 Sept 2026 · 11 MW · 3 12 Sept 2026 · 1,630 MW · 74
11 Sept 12 Sept

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

The weather it burned in

29°high
45km/h · peak gust
20%lowest humidity

It had gone 9 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

8% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 284 ha in 2022.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 2.3% of the area of London (37 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. Ayagozskiy where it started
    3,675 ha reached on 11 Sept
    0.1 %

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)
11 Sept 26.2 °C 25 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
12 Sept 29.0 °C 20 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
13 Sept 24.9 °C 29 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
14 Sept 25.9 °C 22 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
15 Sept after 22.6 °C 26 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
16 Sept after 17.9 °C 31 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
17 Sept after 16.2 °C 42 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
18 Sept after 21.4 °C 26 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
19 Sept after 25.2 °C 20 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
20 Sept after 23.7 °C 26 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
21 Sept after 21.7 °C 30 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
22 Sept after 19.7 °C 40 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
23 Sept after 16.0 °C 43 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
24 Sept after 14.4 °C 45 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 27

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 4 Sept 2026
After · 21 Sept 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.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 13 September 2026 the air beside the fire reached 53 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 32: 2.1 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak53 µg/m³
Days over the guideline2 days
PM1063 µg/m³
Optical depth0.35
9 Sept11 Sept13 Sept15 Sept17 Sept
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 · 77Every 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 Kazakhstan

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Ayagozskiy fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 11 September 2026 and 14 September 2026: 4 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 3,687 hectares (36.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Ayagozskiy (3,675 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 29.0 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 45 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 41, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Kazakhstan (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

History of this page Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

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?

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. 77 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.