Kiliia fire, April 2026 Кілійський район · Kiliia
The fire started on 28 April 2026 in Kiliia, Ukraine, and satellites saw it burning for 2 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 1,235 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.
This record is fire in the reed beds of the Danube Delta, not a forest fire. Thousands of hectares of reed burn in the delta every year, mostly between January and April, and many of these burns are deliberate. That is why it is left out of the fire rankings.
The power measured by the satellite is low (14.3 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 1,235ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- ≈ 2days
- 28 Apr 2026 – 29 Apr 2026
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- districts
- Started on
- 28 Apr
- 2026
- Heat detections
- 3
- in a single hotspot: 14 MW
- Danger at start
- 10
- Low · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 18MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
28 Apr 2026 · 18 MW · 3
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
It had gone 8 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.3 mm on 9 May.
This area had burned before
No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Kyiv boundary: geoBoundaries · OpenStreetMap, Wambacher · © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 1.0).
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).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
1,235 ha reached on 28 Apr0.9 %
Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the official 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.
What burned
- Other natural land100 %
Land cover inside the perimeter as reported by Copernicus EFFIS (outside the Corine Land Cover area).
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 Apr | 12.3 °C | 52 % | 33 km/h | 0.6 mm | Low 10 |
| 30 Apr after | 12.0 °C | 44 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 11 |
| 1 May after | 11.7 °C | 38 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 11 |
| 2 May after | 11.3 °C | 49 % | 43 km/h | 0.6 mm | Low 10 |
| 3 May after | 13.9 °C | 38 % | 34 km/h | 0.1 mm | Low 10 |
| 4 May after | 17.3 °C | 33 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 14 |
| 5 May after | 19.9 °C | 36 % | 26 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 12 |
| 6 May after | 21.4 °C | 41 % | 28 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 13 |
| 7 May after | 18.9 °C | 61 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 12 |
| 8 May after | 20.1 °C | 60 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 12 |
| 9 May after | 20.1 °C | 61 % | 23 km/h | 1.3 mm | Very low 4 |
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.
The smoke
CAMS · CopernicusOn 2 May 2026 the air beside the fire reached 7 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).
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 · 3Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 6,700 haChilia Veche31 March 2022 · 4 days · 8 km away
- 3,412 haChilia Veche29 March 2025 · 1 day · 10 km away
- 6,252 haKiliia Кілійський район24 March 2022 · 9 days · 16 km away
- 5,149 haKiliia Кілійський район3 January 2026 · 1 day · 16 km away
- 3,327 haC.A. Rosetti21 January 2020 · 4 days · 18 km away
- 7,692 haSulina20 March 2022 · 9 days · 21 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Kiliia fire last?
- The official perimeter only gives the start date (29 April 2026). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 29 April 2026 (2 days from 28 April 2026), the last day with detections before more than 10 days in a row without any, so it is approximate.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 1,235 hectares (12.4 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Kiliia (1,235 ha, 0.9 %).
- Did the fire reach a town?
- The fire started in Kiliia and came within 11.2 km of its centre. That is the distance from the perimeter, or the nearest hotspot, to the point marking the centre; it does not mean it entered the houses.
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 12.3 °C, humidity dropped to 52 % and gusts hit 33 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 10, class Low.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Ukraine (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: 101 · 112 · Emergency number and official warnings ›
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: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
- The official perimeter has no end date: the end is the last day with VIIRS detections inside the perimeter before a gap of more than 10 days (150 days at most), so it is approximate. 3 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.
- Probably a vegetation burn: not counted in the totals.
Where this data comes from
The perimeter and land cover come from the Copernicus European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), measured on MODIS and Sentinel-2 imagery and published under CC BY 4.0. 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 (Public Domain). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ slightly from each country’s official figure.