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Kanchibiya fire, 4 September 2017 Kanchibiya

Out · last detection 14 Sept 2017, 23:29 UTC

The fire started on 4 September 2017 in Kanchibiya, Zambia, and satellites saw it burning for 10 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 12,031 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 78th largest in Muchinga since 2016 (of 520 with a page). Number 30 in Zambia in 2017, of 230.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Kanchibiya · 2016Kanchibiya · 2021Kanchibiya · 2020Kanchibiya · 2016

Burnt area
12,031ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
10days
4 Sept 2017 – 13 Sept 2017
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
4 Sept
2017
Heat detections
444
in a single hotspot: 0 MW
Danger at start
45
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
456MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 4 Sept13 Sept
14 Sept 2017

How it evolved, day by day

4 Sept 2017 · 15 MW · 4 5 Sept 2017 · 630 MW · 68 6 Sept 2017 · 373 MW · 56 7 Sept 2017 · 602 MW · 57 8 Sept 2017 · 669 MW · 59 9 Sept 2017 · 1,044 MW · 52 10 Sept 2017 · 233 MW · 24 11 Sept 2017 · 890 MW · 61 12 Sept 2017 · 236 MW · 18 13 Sept 2017 · 167 MW · 24 14 Sept 2017 · 162 MW · 21
4 Sept 6 Sept 8 Sept 9 Sept 10 Sept 12 Sept 14 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

30°high
47km/h · peak gust
17%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

50% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 6,077 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 7.6% of the area of London (120 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. Kanchibiya where it started
    12,096 ha
    1.4 %

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 area3.2 ha
Residents≈ 500

Inside the perimeter there were about 3.2 hectares of built-up land and about 500 residents (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)
4 Sept 27.7 °C 27 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
5 Sept 28.4 °C 25 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
6 Sept 29.5 °C 26 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
7 Sept 29.0 °C 21 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
8 Sept 29.6 °C 22 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
9 Sept 30.5 °C 20 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
10 Sept 30.1 °C 21 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
11 Sept 30.5 °C 18 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
12 Sept 30.0 °C 17 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
13 Sept 30.3 °C 18 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
14 Sept after 30.4 °C 16 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
15 Sept after 31.2 °C 14 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
16 Sept after 31.0 °C 17 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
17 Sept after 32.5 °C 15 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
18 Sept after 32.0 °C 15 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
19 Sept after 31.4 °C 20 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
20 Sept after 31.4 °C 26 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
21 Sept after 31.1 °C 18 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
22 Sept after 30.4 °C 20 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
23 Sept after 30.8 °C 21 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 28 Aug 2017
After · 20 Sept 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 · 0Every 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 Zambia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Kanchibiya fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 4 September 2017 and 13 September 2017: 10 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 12,031 hectares (120.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Kanchibiya (12,096 ha, 1.4 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 30.5 °C, humidity dropped to 17 % and gusts hit 47 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 48, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Zambia (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 · 4 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 18 September 2017 → 13 September 2017.
  2. Start date: 31 August 2017 → 4 September 2017.
  3. Last day with fire: 13 September 2017 → 18 September 2017.
  4. Start date: 4 September 2017 → 31 August 2017.

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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. No 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 ADM2 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)). 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.