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Kasempa fire, 2 September 2023 Kasempa

Out · last detection 16 Sept 2023, 12:04 UTC

The fire started on 2 September 2023 in Kasempa, Zambia, and satellites saw it burning for 14 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,621 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 44th largest in North-Western since 2016 (of 287 with a page). Number 40 in Zambia in 2023, of 165.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Kasempa · 2021Kasempa · 2026Mufumbwe · 2018Mufumbwe · 2017

Burnt area
6,621ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
14days
2 Sept 2023 – 15 Sept 2023
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
2 Sept
2023
Heat detections
299
in a single hotspot: 0 MW
Danger at start
40
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
219MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 2 Sept15 Sept
16 Sept 2023

How it evolved, day by day

2 Sept 2023 · 51 MW · 5 3 Sept 2023 · 3 MW · 1 4 Sept 2023 · 121 MW · 24 5 Sept 2023 · 229 MW · 26 6 Sept 2023 · 163 MW · 28 7 Sept 2023 · 78 MW · 13 8 Sept 2023 · 701 MW · 56 9 Sept 2023 · 1,045 MW · 62 10 Sept 2023 · 76 MW · 20 11 Sept 2023 · 501 MW · 30 12 Sept 2023 · 46 MW · 8 13 Sept 2023 · 65 MW · 8 14 Sept 2023 · 34 MW · 3 15 Sept 2023 · 22 MW · 3 16 Sept 2023 · 144 MW · 12
2 Sept 5 Sept 8 Sept 9 Sept 11 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

34°high
58km/h · peak gust
12%lowest humidity

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

This area had burned before

78% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 378 ha in 2016, 565 ha in 2019, 948 ha in 2020, 2,484 ha in 2021, 3,798 ha in 2022. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 5,191 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 4.2% of the area of London (66 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. Kasempa where it started
    6,669 ha
    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)
2 Sept 31.5 °C 16 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
3 Sept 32.1 °C 18 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
4 Sept 31.6 °C 17 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
5 Sept 31.8 °C 23 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
6 Sept 32.6 °C 22 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
7 Sept 33.6 °C 14 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
8 Sept 33.4 °C 15 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
9 Sept 31.9 °C 18 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
10 Sept 31.7 °C 17 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
11 Sept 33.7 °C 22 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
12 Sept 34.5 °C 12 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
13 Sept 30.5 °C 27 % 58 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
14 Sept 30.5 °C 28 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
15 Sept 31.3 °C 25 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
16 Sept after 33.2 °C 18 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
17 Sept after 34.4 °C 13 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
18 Sept after 34.9 °C 11 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
19 Sept after 33.7 °C 15 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
20 Sept after 33.5 °C 15 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
21 Sept after 34.7 °C 13 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
22 Sept after 34.8 °C 16 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
23 Sept after 34.2 °C 17 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
24 Sept after 35.2 °C 18 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
25 Sept after 35.7 °C 17 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 26 Aug 2023
After · 22 Sept 2023

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 11 September 2023 the air beside the fire reached 55 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 36: 2.4 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak55 µg/m³
Days over the guideline13 days
PM1078 µg/m³
Optical depth1.16
31123456789101112131415161718
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 · 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 Kasempa fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 2 September 2023 and 15 September 2023: 14 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 6,621 hectares (66.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Kasempa (6,669 ha, 0.3 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 34.5 °C, humidity dropped to 12 % and gusts hit 58 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 57, class Extreme.
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: 19 September 2023 → 15 September 2023.
  2. Start date: 31 August 2023 → 2 September 2023.
  3. Last day with fire: 15 September 2023 → 19 September 2023.
  4. Start date: 2 September 2023 → 31 August 2023.

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. 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 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 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.