Karonga fire, 27 October 2020 Karonga
The fire started on 27 October 2020 in Karonga, Malawi, and satellites saw it burning for 8 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,429 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 213th largest in Northern Region since 2016 (of 420 with a page). Number 41 in Malawi in 2020, of 87.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 1,429ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 8days
- 27 Oct 2020 – 3 Nov 2020
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- districts
- Started on
- 27 Oct
- 2020
- Heat detections
- 56
- in a single hotspot: 39 MW
- Average daily power
- 40MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
This area had burned before
32% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 246 ha in 2016, 7 ha in 2018, 218 ha in 2019.
- 246 ha Karonga fire, October 2016 1,288 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 218 ha Karonga fire, October 2019 2,006 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 7 ha Karonga fire, October 2018 1,516 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
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
-
Karonga where it started1,436 ha reached on 21 Oct0.4 %
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.
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
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 · 56Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 8,073 haKaronga23 October 2025 · 19 days · 5 km away
- 15,432 haChitipa 13 October 2026 · 12 days · 20 km away
- 22,043 haChitipa26 October 2025 · 14 days · 21 km away
- 6,676 haKaronga14 October 2025 · 21 days · 34 km away
- 10,386 haChitipa25 October 2025 · 18 days · 36 km away
- 5,627 haChitipa18 October 2025 · 18 days · 40 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Karonga fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 27 October 2020 and 3 November 2020: 8 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 1,429 hectares (14.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Karonga (1,436 ha, 0.4 %).
- Where does this data come from?
- From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Malawi (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.
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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 56 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
- We have not matched this page with any official record.
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.