How long did the Katangsky Rayon fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 5 August 2017 and 23 August 2017: 19 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 7,216 hectares (72.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Katangsky Rayon (7,141 ha, 0.0 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 32.3 °C, humidity dropped to 25 % and gusts hit 46 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 Russia (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

RU · Russia · 2017-08-05 → 2017-08-23

Katangsky Rayon fire, 5 August 2017 Katangsky Rayon

Out · last detection 23 Aug 2017, 19:57 UTC

The fire started on 5 August 2017 in Katangsky Rayon, Russia, and satellites saw it burning for 19 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 7,216 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 168th largest in Irkutsk Oblast since 2016 (of 428 with a page). Number 106 in Russia in 2017, of 367.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Katangsky Rayon · 2019 Katangsky Rayon · 2021 Katangsky Rayon · 2017 Katangsky Rayon · 2016

Burnt area: 7,216ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 19days; 5 Aug 2017 – 23 Aug 2017
Municipalities hit: 1; districts
Started on: 5 Aug; 2017
Heat detections: 1,084; in a single hotspot: 301 MW
Danger at start: 17; Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power: 346MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 5 Aug23 Aug

Play back 23 Aug 2017

How it evolved, day by day

5 Aug 8 Aug 11 Aug 14 Aug 17 Aug 20 Aug 23 Aug

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

46km/h · peak gust

25%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 4.3 mm on 24 Aug.

This area had burned before

10% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 790 ha in 2016. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 702 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 4.6% of the area of London (72 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

Katangsky Rayon where it started

7,141 ha reached on 5 Aug

0.0 %

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 area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (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)
30 Jul	29.4 °C	36 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 17
31 Jul	24.9 °C	47 %	37 km/h	0.2 mm	Moderate 18
1 Aug	26.3 °C	33 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
2 Aug	27.1 °C	31 %	14 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
3 Aug	29.4 °C	28 %	25 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
4 Aug	27.3 °C	41 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	High 23
5 Aug	29.3 °C	25 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
6 Aug	30.4 °C	33 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
7 Aug	31.5 °C	36 %	18 km/h	0.2 mm	High 27
8 Aug	31.2 °C	37 %	22 km/h	1.4 mm	Moderate 14
9 Aug	32.3 °C	27 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 29
10 Aug	27.7 °C	37 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
11 Aug	23.1 °C	53 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
12 Aug	29.3 °C	30 %	20 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
13 Aug	32.3 °C	33 %	29 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
14 Aug	32.3 °C	35 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
15 Aug	19.4 °C	48 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 24
16 Aug	20.4 °C	42 %	17 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 19
17 Aug	20.4 °C	38 %	19 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
18 Aug	18.8 °C	38 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 22
19 Aug	23.0 °C	34 %	14 km/h	0.0 mm	High 23
20 Aug	23.8 °C	28 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
21 Aug	19.7 °C	44 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
22 Aug	19.1 °C	31 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
23 Aug	14.7 °C	52 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	High 24
24 Aug after	11.8 °C	71 %	29 km/h	4.3 mm	Very low 1

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 29 Jul 2017

After · 30 Aug 2017

Before After

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 · 1,084Every 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 time	Satellite	FRP (MW)	Lat	Lon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Russia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Katangsky Rayon fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 5 August 2017 and 23 August 2017: 19 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 7,216 hectares (72.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Katangsky Rayon (7,141 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 32.3 °C, humidity dropped to 25 % and gusts hit 46 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 Russia (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

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

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.

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.

Report an error

What do you think is wrong?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

What really happened?

Your connection to the fire (optional) Email (optional)

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. 1,084 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 (Open Data Commons Open Database License 1.0). 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.

Where it burned