How long did the Khangalassky Ulus fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 23 June 2021 to 20 July 2021 (28 days). The perimeter dates it from 26 June 2021 to 20 July 2021.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 23,426 hectares (234.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Khangalassky Ulus (23,224 ha, 0.9 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 33.8 °C, humidity dropped to 25 % and gusts hit 38 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 31, 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 · 2021-06-23 → 2021-07-20

Khangalassky Ulus fire, 23 June 2021 Khangalassky Ulus

Out · last detection 19 Jul 2021, 17:39 UTC

The fire started on 23 June 2021 in Khangalassky Ulus, Russia, and satellites saw it burning for 28 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 23,426 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 219th largest in Sakha Republic since 2016 (of 1422 with a page). Number 82 in Russia in 2021, of 581.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Khangalassky Ulus · 2021 Khangalassky Ulus · 2021 Gorny Ulus · 2021

Burnt area: 23,426ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 28days; 23 Jun 2021 – 20 Jul 2021
Municipalities hit: 1; districts
Started on: 23 Jun; 2021
Heat detections: 3,113; in a single hotspot: 248 MW
Danger at start: 31; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 1.8GW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 23 Jun20 Jul

Play back 19 Jul 2021

How it evolved, day by day

23 Jun 28 Jun 3 Jul 6 Jul 8 Jul 13 Jul 16 Jul 19 Jul

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

38km/h · peak gust

25%lowest humidity

It had gone 10 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.9 mm on 21 Jul.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 15% of the area of London (234 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

Khangalassky Ulus where it started

23,224 ha reached on 23 Jun

0.9 %

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 2020

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2020, 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)
23 Jun	32.5 °C	27 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
24 Jun	28.8 °C	37 %	33 km/h	1.6 mm	Moderate 14
25 Jun	21.8 °C	77 %	17 km/h	10.0 mm	Very low 0
26 Jun	25.4 °C	55 %	20 km/h	1.3 mm	Very low 2
27 Jun	25.8 °C	50 %	17 km/h	0.9 mm	Very low 4
28 Jun	27.9 °C	42 %	22 km/h	0.0 mm	Low 10
29 Jun	25.5 °C	55 %	31 km/h	2.4 mm	Very low 4
30 Jun	28.3 °C	52 %	20 km/h	0.8 mm	Low 7
1 Jul	33.8 °C	25 %	20 km/h	0.0 mm	High 22
2 Jul	33.0 °C	29 %	21 km/h	0.0 mm	High 22
3 Jul	31.5 °C	32 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	High 24
4 Jul	28.0 °C	41 %	32 km/h	0.2 mm	High 22
5 Jul	24.4 °C	39 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	High 24
6 Jul	25.2 °C	51 %	30 km/h	0.1 mm	Moderate 18
7 Jul	30.4 °C	33 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	High 22
8 Jul	33.6 °C	30 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
9 Jul	26.0 °C	63 %	36 km/h	3.0 mm	Very low 5
10 Jul	17.4 °C	66 %	29 km/h	6.1 mm	Very low 0
11 Jul	20.4 °C	36 %	33 km/h	0.6 mm	Very low 4
12 Jul	22.4 °C	43 %	22 km/h	0.0 mm	Low 8
13 Jul	24.3 °C	39 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 13
14 Jul	27.5 °C	35 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 17
15 Jul	23.9 °C	46 %	34 km/h	0.3 mm	Moderate 19
16 Jul	20.7 °C	44 %	38 km/h	2.1 mm	Low 6
17 Jul	23.9 °C	36 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 14
18 Jul	27.2 °C	46 %	25 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 15
19 Jul	31.8 °C	36 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 22
20 Jul	24.2 °C	59 %	20 km/h	0.5 mm	Moderate 14
21 Jul after	20.8 °C	70 %	34 km/h	1.9 mm	Very low 4

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 16 Jun 2021

After · 27 Jul 2021

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 · 3,113Every 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 Khangalassky Ulus fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 23 June 2021 to 20 July 2021 (28 days). The perimeter dates it from 26 June 2021 to 20 July 2021.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 23,426 hectares (234.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Khangalassky Ulus (23,224 ha, 0.9 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 33.8 °C, humidity dropped to 25 % and gusts hit 38 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 31, 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

25 October 2026 Start date: 26 June 2021 → 23 June 2021.

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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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?

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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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 26 June 2021 to 20 July 2021. 3,113 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 2020, 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