Burned area
satellite only2,049ha
Perimeter published by GWIS (Copernicus).
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus)
- Date
- 8 Aug 2021 – 11 Aug 2021
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page to compare it with.
BW · Botswana · –
Gemsbok fire, 8 August 2021 Tshabong, Gemsbok
Out · last detection 9 Aug 2021, 12:00 UTC
The fire started on 8 August 2021 in Gemsbok, Botswana, and satellites saw it burning for 4 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,049 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.
It is the 373th largest in Kgalagadi since 2016 (of 379 with a page). Number 396 in Botswana in 2021, of 406.
The power measured by the satellite is low (26.3 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.
Use this data
Compare with…
Use this data
Fire page data · version 2026-10-27matches the official recordwith caveatssatellite onlymodel
When copying, the sentence is
Tick the figures you want: they make up the lede and the CSV.
Duration by satellite
satellite only4days
8 Aug 2021 to 11 Aug 2021: first and last day with fire on the page.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- last detection: 9 Aug 2021, 12:00 UTC
+− cross-check
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.
Start
satellite only8 Aug 2021
First day with fire seen by the satellites or the perimeter.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- 8 Aug 2021
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page, so the alert time and the cause are not known here.
Hotspots
satellite only34
VIIRS detections at 375 m. Most intense hotspot: 26 MW.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (Suomi NPP)
- Date
- 8 Aug 2021 – 11 Aug 2021
+− cross-check
There is no official record to compare with. Each hotspot is a pixel detected in one satellite pass, not a separate fire.
The worst day
satellite only236MW
Total radiative power on 8 August 2021; hotspots that day: 33.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (FRP)
- Date
- 8 Aug 2021
+− cross-check
Fire radiative power (FRP) measures the energy the fire gives off when the satellite passes. Added up by day, it compares intensity, not area.
Danger at the start
model69.7FWI · extreme
Fire Weather Index (Canadian system) computed by WorldFires for the day the fire started. Consecutive days without rain before: 60.
- Source
- WorldFires calculation (Canadian FWI system)
- Date
- 8 Aug 2021, local noon
- Model
- ERA5 0,25° (ECMWF · Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com
+− cross-check
This is an index computed from weather model data, not a measurement of the fire nor an official warning. Danger warnings are issued by each country’s authority. Emergency number and official warnings
Weather during the fire
model30.1°C · 10% RH
High of 30.1 °C and minimum humidity of 10% on 8 August 2021; gusts of 55 km/h on 11 August 2021.
- Source
- weather model at the fire’s grid cell
- Date
- 8 Aug 2021 – 11 Aug 2021
- Model
- ERA5 0,25° (ECMWF · Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com
+− cross-check
These are model values for a cell of about 25 km, not from a weather station: they may differ from what was measured on the ground.
This page’s change log has been kept since 24 October 2026: every night what it publishes is compared and the difference is logged. Anything earlier is reconstructed from each source’s date and marked as reconstructed.
Show
-
· reconstructed weatherWeather and FWI computed from the ERA5 reanalysis
-
logLast day with fire: 8 August 2021 → 11 August 2021.
What was saved on 27 October 2026
Every night a snapshot of what the page shows is saved. If anything changes, it appears in the list as a log entry.
- Area
- 2,049 ha
- Dates
- 8 Aug 2021 – 11 Aug 2021
- Name
- Tshabong
- Official record
- —
Versioned permanent link
https://worldfires.org/en/fire/gemsbok-2021-08-13?v=2026-10-27A version keeps the area, dates, name and official record; the area as it was logged (changes under 2% are not logged). The map, hotspots and weather always show today’s data.
Citation
A lede of about 60 words figures only, no adjectives
CSV for this fire gemsbok-2021-08-13.csv · daily, no individual hotspots
| fecha | focos_viirs | frp_mw | tmax_c | tmin_c | hr_min_pct | viento_max_kmh | racha_max_kmh | precip_mm | fwi | clase_fwi | dentro_del_incendio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-08-08 | 33 | 236 | 30.1 | 8.8 | 10 | 23.3 | 41.8 | 0 | 69.7 | extremo | 1 |
| 2021-08-09 | 1 | 7 | 20.1 | 8.4 | 24 | 25.6 | 41.8 | 0 | 64 | extremo | 1 |
| 2021-08-10 | 0 | 0 | 21.3 | 3.3 | 13 | 16 | 27 | 0 | 47.4 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2021-08-11 | 0 | 0 | 28.8 | 6.8 | 14 | 32.2 | 55.1 | 0 | 90.4 | muy_extremo | 1 |
| 2021-08-12 | 0 | 0 | 19.3 | 7.3 | 29 | 19 | 34.6 | 0 | 50.5 | extremo | 0 |
| 2021-08-13 | 0 | 0 | 19.6 | 4 | 16 | 20.4 | 29.2 | 0 | 44.2 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2021-08-14 | 0 | 0 | 22.9 | 5.4 | 35 | 20.8 | 40 | 0 | 44.2 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2021-08-15 | 0 | 0 | 27 | 9.4 | 25 | 26.4 | 42.5 | 0 | 50.6 | extremo | 0 |
| 2021-08-16 | 0 | 0 | 28.3 | 15.5 | 20 | 30.2 | 51.5 | 0 | 71.4 | muy_extremo | 0 |
| 2021-08-17 | 0 | 0 | 30 | 17.7 | 15 | 33.6 | 52.2 | 0 | 85.8 | muy_extremo | 0 |
| 2021-08-18 | 0 | 0 | 23 | 9.8 | 18 | 18.7 | 30.2 | 0 | 57.9 | extremo | 0 |
| 2021-08-19 | 0 | 0 | 20.6 | 4 | 25 | 14.6 | 24.8 | 0 | 41.3 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2021-08-20 | 0 | 0 | 24.8 | 5.7 | 14 | 15.9 | 26.6 | 0 | 44.5 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2021-08-21 | 0 | 0 | 25.5 | 6.4 | 14 | 21.5 | 31.7 | 0 | 63.4 | extremo | 0 |
It is generated in your browser from this page’s data: one file per fire, aggregated by day and without individual hotspots.
Live widget for your story
It updates itself while the fire is still active and links to this page. Free, with the attribution shown at the bottom.
Sources for this page: GWIS (Copernicus), NASA FIRMS (VIIRS), ERA5 (ECMWF/Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0). Open-Meteo.com · How we build fire pages: methodology
- Burnt area
- 2,049ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 4days
- 8 Aug 2021 – 11 Aug 2021
- Municipalities hit
- 2
- subdistricts
- Started on
- 8 Aug
- 2021
- Heat detections
- 34
- in a single hotspot: 26 MW
- Danger at start
- 70
- Extreme · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 121MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
HOTSPOTS BY DAY
8 Aug11 Aug
9 Aug 2021
How it evolved, day by day
8 Aug
9 Aug
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
30°high
55km/h · peak gust
10%lowest humidity
It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.
This area had burned before
21% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 465 ha in 2017. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 427 ha that had burned before.
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
1,578 ha0.0 %
-
Gemsbok where it started475 ha0.0 %
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.
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)
Started with Very dry air: 63 % of the area in Botswana 60 days without rain: 71 % of the area in Botswana
| Day | High | Min. humidity | Peak gust | Rain | Danger (FWI) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 Aug | 30.1 °C | 10 % | 42 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 70 |
| 9 Aug | 20.1 °C | 24 % | 42 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 64 |
| 10 Aug | 21.3 °C | 13 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 47 |
| 11 Aug | 28.8 °C | 14 % | 55 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very extreme 90 |
| 12 Aug after | 19.3 °C | 29 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 50 |
| 13 Aug after | 19.6 °C | 16 % | 29 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 14 Aug after | 22.9 °C | 35 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 15 Aug after | 27.0 °C | 25 % | 42 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 51 |
| 16 Aug after | 28.3 °C | 20 % | 52 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very extreme 71 |
| 17 Aug after | 30.0 °C | 15 % | 52 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very extreme 86 |
| 18 Aug after | 23.0 °C | 18 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 58 |
| 19 Aug after | 20.6 °C | 25 % | 25 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 41 |
| 20 Aug after | 24.8 °C | 14 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 21 Aug after | 25.5 °C | 14 % | 32 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 63 |
Its twins: fires that started in the same weather
It started with an FWI of 69.7, a minimum humidity of 10% and more than two months without rain. Fires in the area that started in weather like this since 2017: 26.
FWI at the start
69.7
Minimum humidity
10 %
Days without rain
60+
this fire
chosen twins
rest of the area
Almost identicalSimilar
Outlines of the closest twins
This fire · Gemsbok fire, 8 August 2021
2,049 ha
4 days
FWI 69.7
Min. humidity 10 %
Gemsbok fire, September 2021
2,523 ha
3 days
FWI 69.7
Min. humidity 9 %
137 km away, in 2021
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
Gemsbok fire, September 2021
8,216 ha
5 days
FWI 69.8
Min. humidity 9 %
133 km away, in 2021
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
Gemsbok fire, September 2021
12,750 ha
7 days
FWI 69.7
Min. humidity 9 %
139 km away, in 2021
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
Gemsbok fire, September 2021
26,731 ha
5 days
FWI 70.1
Min. humidity 9 %
134 km away, in 2021
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
Gemsbok fire, September 2021
3,132 ha
7 days
FWI 69.2
Min. humidity 9 %
144 km away, in 2021
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
What happened to them
- 5 days
- median duration
- 3,743 ha
- median area
- 15 %
- went past 10,000 ha
- 3.9 mm
- rain at the end (median; 6 of 26 had it)
It stayed below its twins: 2,049 ha against a median of 3,743 ha. It lasted 4 days, against 5 days.
In 20 of 26, not even 1 mm fell in the ten days after the end: they went out without rain. In the rest, the first rainy day brought a median of 3.9 mm.
This is a bank of analogues: it shows what usually happens, not what will happen. With fewer than 15 twins we give no figures. How we calculate it
How it ended
—first rain
—no rain in ten days
55km/h · max. gust
It was considered over on 11 Aug, and not even 1 mm fell in the following ten days: it went out without rain. Twins with rain when they ended: 6 of 26, with a median of 3.9 mm.
Weather on this page: Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)
How a twin is chosen
- Same area: fires that have already ended, less than 250 km from this one, since 2017.
- Same start: we compare the FWI on the first day, the minimum humidity that day and the run of days without rain before it. The slider sets how much they may differ.
- Only pages with final weather data (ERA5 reanalysis) calculated in the same way as this fire’s; agricultural and grass burns and pages with data under review are left out.
- Fires burning at the same time as this one (a week before or after) are left out: they share the same spell of weather and do not count as a precedent.
- They are sorted by similarity, and the outlines of the first five are drawn.
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
↔
Before · 1 Aug 2021
After · 18 Aug 2021
Sentinel-2 did not pass over on that day. Try another date, or use false colour, which is daily.
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 · 34Every 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
- 40,072 haGemsbok26 August 2021 · 10 days · 16 km away
- 17,947 haTshabong7 August 2021 · 3 days · 17 km away
- 15,053 haTshabong30 November 2023 · 4 days · 28 km away
- 73,454 haGemsbok 5 November 2026 · 11 days · 29 km away
- 34,520 haTshabong8 August 2021 · 7 days · 29 km away
- 121,419 haTshabong23 August 2021 · 24 days · 37 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Gemsbok fire last?
- According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 8 August 2021 to 11 August 2021 (4 days). The perimeter dates it from 8 August 2021 to 8 August 2021.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 2,049 hectares (20.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 2 municipalities: Tshabong (1,578 ha, 0.0 %); Gemsbok (475 ha, 0.0 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 30.1 °C, humidity dropped to 10 % and gusts hit 55 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 90, class Very extreme.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Botswana (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.
- How did the fires that started in similar weather in this area end?
- Fires less than 250 km away that started since 2017 with a similar FWI, humidity and dry spell: 26. Their median duration was 5 days and their median area 3,743 ha; 15 % went past 10,000 ha. In 20 of 26, not even 1 mm fell in the ten days after the end: they went out without rain. In the rest, the first rainy day brought a median of 3.9 mm.
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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
- Last day with fire: 8 August 2021 → 11 August 2021.
RSS Changes to this page With cross-checks and a citable version
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
How we know this
- Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
- Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 8 August 2021 to 8 August 2021. 34 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.
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 (Public Domain). 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.