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UG · Uganda · –

Jie fire, 16 November 2025 Jie

Out · last detection 1 Dec 2025, 11:40 UTC

The fire started on 16 November 2025 in Jie, Uganda, and satellites saw it burning for 17 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,214 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 132 in Uganda in 2025, of 179.

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.

The power measured by the satellite is low (16.3 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.

Compare with…
Burnt area
1,214ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
17days
16 Nov 2025 – 2 Dec 2025
Municipalities hit
1
counties
Started on
16 Nov
2025
Heat detections
19
in a single hotspot: 16 MW
Danger at start
24
High · FWI index
Average daily power
16MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 16 Nov2 Dec
1 Dec 2025

How it evolved, day by day

16 Nov 2025 · 3 MW · 1 17 Nov 2025 · 2 MW · 1 22 Nov 2025 · 15 MW · 3 25 Nov 2025 · 6 MW · 2 26 Nov 2025 · 6 MW · 1 27 Nov 2025 · 21 MW · 5 1 Dec 2025 · 58 MW · 6
16 Nov 22 Nov 26 Nov 1 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

32°high
59km/h · peak gust
18%lowest humidity

It had gone 7 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 0.8% of the area of London (12 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. Jie where it started
    1,222 ha reached on 16 Nov
    0.3 %

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)
16 Nov 31.6 °C 24 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
17 Nov 29.4 °C 34 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
18 Nov 30.2 °C 38 % 53 km/h 0.4 mm High 25
19 Nov 30.3 °C 37 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
20 Nov 29.6 °C 34 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
21 Nov 30.3 °C 30 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
22 Nov 30.5 °C 22 % 56 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
23 Nov 30.1 °C 27 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
24 Nov 30.6 °C 31 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
25 Nov 31.5 °C 31 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
26 Nov 30.1 °C 33 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
27 Nov 30.3 °C 33 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
28 Nov 30.6 °C 31 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
29 Nov 30.8 °C 33 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
30 Nov 30.6 °C 24 % 59 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
1 Dec 31.2 °C 18 % 59 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
2 Dec 31.7 °C 20 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
3 Dec after 31.7 °C 26 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
4 Dec after 31.1 °C 28 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
5 Dec after 30.9 °C 30 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
6 Dec after 30.6 °C 32 % 59 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
7 Dec after 31.5 °C 28 % 57 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
8 Dec after 30.9 °C 31 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
9 Dec after 31.2 °C 33 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
10 Dec after 29.8 °C 32 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
11 Dec after 30.1 °C 35 % 38 km/h 0.1 mm High 32
12 Dec after 29.4 °C 40 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 30

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 9 Nov 2025
After · 9 Dec 2025

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 22 November 2025 the air beside the fire reached 18 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak18 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1023 µg/m³
Optical depth0.29
20 Nov23 Nov26 Nov29 Nov2 Dec
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 · 19Every 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 Uganda

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Jie fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 16 November 2025 to 2 December 2025 (17 days). The perimeter dates it from 22 November 2025 to 30 November 2025.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 1,214 hectares (12.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Jie (1,222 ha, 0.3 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 31.7 °C, humidity dropped to 18 % and gusts hit 59 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 45, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Uganda (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: 999 · 112 · Emergency number and official warnings

Satellite cross-check

History of this page · 2 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 30 November 2025 → 2 December 2025.
  2. Start date: 22 November 2025 → 16 November 2025.

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
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 999 · 112.

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 22 November 2025 to 30 November 2025. 19 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 (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.