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ID · Indonesia · –

Kapuas fire, 29 September 2026 Kapuas

Out · last detection 24 Oct 2026, 17:32 UTC

The fire started on 29 September 2026 in Kapuas, Indonesia, and satellites saw it burning for 26 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,120 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 572 in Indonesia in 2026, of 981.

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
2,120ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
26days
29 Sept 2026 – 24 Oct 2026
Municipalities hit
1
regencies
Started on
29 Sept
2026
Heat detections
133
in a single hotspot: 70 MW
Danger at start
8
Low · FWI index
Average daily power
51MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 29 Sept24 Oct
24 Oct 2026

How it evolved, day by day

2 Oct 2026 · 1 MW · 1 4 Oct 2026 · 0 MW · 0 5 Oct 2026 · 10 MW · 4 6 Oct 2026 · 19 MW · 10 7 Oct 2026 · 34 MW · 9 8 Oct 2026 · 31 MW · 4 9 Oct 2026 · 0 MW · 0 10 Oct 2026 · 13 MW · 4 11 Oct 2026 · 7 MW · 5 12 Oct 2026 · 0 MW · 0 13 Oct 2026 · 23 MW · 10 14 Oct 2026 · 18 MW · 9 17 Oct 2026 · 2 MW · 2 18 Oct 2026 · 0 MW · 0 19 Oct 2026 · 0 MW · 0 21 Oct 2026 · 40 MW · 19 22 Oct 2026 · 457 MW · 52 23 Oct 2026 · 6 MW · 4 24 Oct 2026 · 0 MW · 0
2 Oct 7 Oct 11 Oct 17 Oct 22 Oct

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

38°high
31km/h · peak gust
29%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 4.6 mm on 25 Oct.

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 1.3% of the area of London (21 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. Kapuas where it started
    2,134 ha reached on 2 Oct
    0.1 %

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 area0.65 ha
Residents≈ 100

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.65 hectares of built-up land and about 100 residents (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)
29 Sept 35.6 °C 45 % 22 km/h 0.7 mm Low 8
30 Sept 35.7 °C 47 % 26 km/h 0.6 mm Moderate 14
1 Oct 36.6 °C 37 % 24 km/h 3.1 mm Low 6
2 Oct 36.2 °C 40 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 15
3 Oct 36.2 °C 38 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
4 Oct 36.8 °C 34 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
5 Oct 36.8 °C 33 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
6 Oct 36.4 °C 35 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
7 Oct 36.4 °C 35 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
8 Oct 36.2 °C 36 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
9 Oct 36.1 °C 37 % 17 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
10 Oct 34.7 °C 47 % 18 km/h 0.4 mm High 26
11 Oct 35.7 °C 42 % 24 km/h 0.1 mm High 25
12 Oct 37.9 °C 31 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
13 Oct 36.3 °C 40 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
14 Oct 38.4 °C 29 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
15 Oct 36.1 °C 44 % 18 km/h 0.1 mm High 27
16 Oct 35.8 °C 46 % 23 km/h 0.5 mm High 26
17 Oct 37.0 °C 34 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
18 Oct 34.4 °C 48 % 20 km/h 2.1 mm High 28
19 Oct 35.0 °C 50 % 19 km/h 4.8 mm Low 10
20 Oct 35.6 °C 45 % 22 km/h 0.2 mm Low 6
21 Oct 36.5 °C 38 % 26 km/h 0.1 mm High 22
22 Oct 37.2 °C 32 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
23 Oct 34.6 °C 42 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
24 Oct 35.0 °C 49 % 16 km/h 0.6 mm High 22
25 Oct after 35.9 °C 48 % 20 km/h 4.6 mm Low 6

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 22 Sept 2026
After · 31 Oct 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 7 October 2026 the air beside the fire reached 3,129 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 1,349: 90 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak3,129 µg/m³
Days over the guideline25 days
PM103,181 µg/m³
Optical depth13.06
27 Sept2 Oct7 Oct12 Oct17 Oct
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 · 133Every 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 Indonesia

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Kapuas fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 29 September 2026 and 24 October 2026: 26 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 2,120 hectares (21.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Kapuas (2,134 ha, 0.1 %).
Is the Kapuas fire still active?
No fire detections since 24 Oct 2026, 17:32 UTC. A lack of detections is not an official extinction.
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 38.4 °C, humidity dropped to 29 % and gusts hit 31 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 35, class High.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Indonesia (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: 112 · Emergency number and official warnings

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.
  1. Last day with fire: 23 October 2026 → 24 October 2026.

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 112.

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. 133 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.