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Guba fire, 11 December 2017 Guba

Out · last detection 17 Dec 2017, 11:26 UTC

The fire started on 11 December 2017 in Guba, Ethiopia, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,347 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 109th largest in Beneshangul Gumu since 2016 (of 699 with a page). Number 56 in Ethiopia in 2017, of 266.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Guba · 2019Guba · 2025Quara · 2016Guba · 2026

Burnt area
5,347ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
6days
11 Dec 2017 – 16 Dec 2017
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
11 Dec
2017
Heat detections
157
in a single hotspot: 74 MW
Danger at start
48
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
99MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 11 Dec16 Dec
17 Dec 2017

How it evolved, day by day

11 Dec 2017 · 11 MW · 6 12 Dec 2017 · 74 MW · 20 13 Dec 2017 · 203 MW · 36 14 Dec 2017 · 252 MW · 37 15 Dec 2017 · 85 MW · 32 16 Dec 2017 · 1 MW · 1 17 Dec 2017 · 66 MW · 5
11 Dec 12 Dec 13 Dec 14 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
27km/h · peak gust
10%lowest humidity

It had gone 55 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

44% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,357 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 3.4% of the area of London (53 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. Guba where it started
    5,384 ha reached on 5 Dec
    0.8 %

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 2015
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2015, 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)
11 Dec 37.2 °C 10 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
12 Dec 37.4 °C 11 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
13 Dec 36.7 °C 10 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
14 Dec 35.8 °C 11 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
15 Dec 35.2 °C 14 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
16 Dec 36.2 °C 11 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
17 Dec after 36.3 °C 12 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
18 Dec after 36.9 °C 13 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
19 Dec after 37.2 °C 12 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
20 Dec after 37.4 °C 11 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
21 Dec after 37.6 °C 11 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
22 Dec after 37.8 °C 8 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
23 Dec after 37.1 °C 8 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
24 Dec after 37.2 °C 7 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
25 Dec after 35.7 °C 7 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
26 Dec after 35.7 °C 8 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 4 Dec 2017
After · 23 Dec 2017

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 · 157Every 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 Ethiopia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Guba fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 11 December 2017 and 16 December 2017: 6 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 5,347 hectares (53.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Guba (5,384 ha, 0.8 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 37.4 °C, humidity dropped to 10 % and gusts hit 27 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 50, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Ethiopia (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. 157 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 2015, 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 ADM3 (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.