How long did the Kilombero fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 11 October 2018 to 3 November 2018 (24 days). The perimeter dates it from 13 October 2018 to 27 October 2018.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 7,153 hectares (71.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Kilombero (7,208 ha, 0.5 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 35.3 °C, humidity dropped to 22 % and gusts hit 42 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 34, class High.

Where does this data come from?

From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Tanzania (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

TZ · Tanzania · 2018-10-11 → 2018-11-03

Kilombero fire, October 2018 Kilombero

Out · last detection 3 Nov 2018, 11:01 UTC

The fire started on 11 October 2018 in Kilombero, Tanzania, and satellites saw it burning for 24 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 7,153 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 38th largest in Morogoro since 2016 (of 146 with a page). Number 15 in Tanzania in 2018, of 72.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Kilombero · 2025 Kilombero · 2026 Kilombero · 2021 Kilombero · 2021

Burnt area: 7,153ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 24days; 11 Oct 2018 – 3 Nov 2018
Municipalities hit: 1; districts
Started on: 11 Oct; 2018
Heat detections: 306; in a single hotspot: 272 MW
Danger at start: 23; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 562MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 11 Oct3 Nov

Play back 3 Nov 2018

How it evolved, day by day

11 Oct 16 Oct 19 Oct 24 Oct 28 Oct 2 Nov

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

35°high

42km/h · peak gust

22%lowest humidity

It had gone one day without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 5.7 mm on 10 Nov.

This area had burned before

12% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 892 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 4.5% 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

Kilombero where it started

7,208 ha reached on 11 Oct

0.5 %

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 area9.6 ha

Residents≈ 1,900

Inside the perimeter there were about 9.6 hectares of built-up land and about 1,900 residents (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)
11 Oct	31.3 °C	40 %	31 km/h	0.3 mm	High 23
12 Oct	31.5 °C	36 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
13 Oct	32.6 °C	32 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
14 Oct	33.2 °C	29 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
15 Oct	33.7 °C	31 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
16 Oct	35.3 °C	29 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
17 Oct	34.1 °C	35 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
18 Oct	34.6 °C	31 %	36 km/h	0.1 mm	High 34
19 Oct	34.9 °C	31 %	42 km/h	0.5 mm	High 34
20 Oct	35.0 °C	33 %	32 km/h	0.4 mm	High 34
21 Oct	34.4 °C	32 %	35 km/h	0.6 mm	High 32
22 Oct	30.8 °C	33 %	30 km/h	3.7 mm	Low 9
23 Oct	32.7 °C	22 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
24 Oct	33.9 °C	23 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
25 Oct	30.2 °C	34 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
26 Oct	31.9 °C	35 %	28 km/h	0.1 mm	High 30
27 Oct	33.5 °C	31 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
28 Oct	33.1 °C	30 %	29 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
29 Oct	32.5 °C	35 %	29 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
30 Oct	33.4 °C	30 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
31 Oct	31.9 °C	37 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
1 Nov	34.3 °C	31 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
2 Nov	34.9 °C	30 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
3 Nov	35.3 °C	31 %	35 km/h	0.1 mm	High 32
4 Nov after	34.0 °C	29 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
5 Nov after	33.0 °C	36 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
6 Nov after	35.5 °C	29 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
7 Nov after	35.9 °C	25 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
8 Nov after	37.2 °C	23 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
9 Nov after	34.5 °C	31 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 38
10 Nov after	33.2 °C	40 %	32 km/h	5.7 mm	Low 7

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 4 Oct 2018

After · 10 Nov 2018

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 · 306Every 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 Tanzania ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Kilombero fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 11 October 2018 to 3 November 2018 (24 days). The perimeter dates it from 13 October 2018 to 27 October 2018.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 7,153 hectares (71.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Kilombero (7,208 ha, 0.5 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 35.3 °C, humidity dropped to 22 % and gusts hit 42 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 34, class High.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Tanzania (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 · 2 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

27 October 2026 Last day with fire: 27 October 2018 → 3 November 2018.
27 October 2026 Start date: 13 October 2018 → 11 October 2018.

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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 13 October 2018 to 27 October 2018. 306 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 (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.

Where it burned