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AR · Argentina · –

Coronel Dorrego fire, December 2025 Coronel Dorrego

Out · last detection 31 Dec 2025, 04:53 UTC

The fire started on 27 December 2025 in Coronel Dorrego, Argentina, and satellites saw it burning for 5 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,846 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 7 in Argentina in 2025, of 73.

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.

Compare with…
Burnt area
6,846ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
5days
27 Dec 2025 – 31 Dec 2025
Municipalities hit
1
departments
Started on
27 Dec
2025
Heat detections
207
in a single hotspot: 238 MW
Danger at start
43
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
840MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 27 Dec31 Dec
31 Dec 2025

How it evolved, day by day

27 Dec 2025 · 619 MW · 37 28 Dec 2025 · 472 MW · 64 29 Dec 2025 · 2,980 MW · 75 30 Dec 2025 · 125 MW · 30 31 Dec 2025 · 4 MW · 1
27 Dec 28 Dec 29 Dec 30 Dec 31 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

34°high
53km/h · peak gust
21%lowest humidity

It had gone 6 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

42% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,502 ha in 2017, 93 ha in 2022, 391 ha in 2023.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 4.3% of the area of London (68 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. Coronel Dorrego 15,825 inhabitants where it started
    6,885 ha reached on 27 Dec
    1.2 %

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)
27 Dec 25.3 °C 34 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
28 Dec 26.3 °C 40 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
29 Dec 33.7 °C 21 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
30 Dec 30.9 °C 35 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
31 Dec 25.9 °C 51 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
1 Jan after 27.3 °C 29 % 72 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
2 Jan after 25.9 °C 26 % 74 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
3 Jan after 17.6 °C 47 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
4 Jan after 23.6 °C 36 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
5 Jan after 30.8 °C 29 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
6 Jan after 30.5 °C 39 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
7 Jan after 19.6 °C 45 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
8 Jan after 24.2 °C 34 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
9 Jan after 28.3 °C 34 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
10 Jan after 30.6 °C 31 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 33

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 20 Dec 2025
After · 7 Jan 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 29 December 2025 the air beside the fire reached 31 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak31 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1035 µg/m³
Optical depth0.23
25 Dec27 Dec29 Dec31 Dec2 Jan
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 · 207Every 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 Argentina

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Coronel Dorrego fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 27 December 2025 and 31 December 2025: 5 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 6,846 hectares (68.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Coronel Dorrego (6,885 ha, 1.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 33.7 °C, humidity dropped to 21 % and gusts hit 53 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 58, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Argentina (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: 911 · 100 · 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 911 · 100.

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. 207 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 (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.