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Kobyaysky Ulus fire, June 2021 Kobyaysky Ulus

Out · last detection 8 Jul 2021, 17:44 UTC

The fire started on 25 June 2021 in Kobyaysky Ulus, Russia, and satellites saw it burning for 14 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 8,788 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 571th largest in Sakha Republic since 2016 (of 1422 with a page). Number 192 in Russia in 2021, of 581.

Compare with…
Burnt area
8,788ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
14days
25 Jun 2021 – 8 Jul 2021
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
25 Jun
2021
Heat detections
1,048
in a single hotspot: 345 MW
Danger at start
14
Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power
962MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 25 Jun8 Jul
8 Jul 2021

How it evolved, day by day

28 Jun 2021 · 326 MW · 37 29 Jun 2021 · 184 MW · 30 30 Jun 2021 · 16 MW · 9 1 Jul 2021 · 701 MW · 119 2 Jul 2021 · 249 MW · 47 3 Jul 2021 · 171 MW · 46 4 Jul 2021 · 1,217 MW · 76 5 Jul 2021 · 71 MW · 20 6 Jul 2021 · 4,710 MW · 247 7 Jul 2021 · 649 MW · 83 8 Jul 2021 · 2,292 MW · 334
28 Jun 30 Jun 2 Jul 4 Jul 6 Jul 8 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

32°high
38km/h · peak gust
26%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

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

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 5.6% of the area of London (88 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. Kobyaysky Ulus where it started
    8,276 ha reached on 28 Jun
    0.1 %

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)
25 Jun 28.7 °C 31 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
26 Jun 30.8 °C 26 % 35 km/h 0.1 mm High 24
27 Jun 30.2 °C 27 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
28 Jun 30.7 °C 27 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
29 Jun 28.9 °C 37 % 29 km/h 0.7 mm Moderate 19
30 Jun 25.2 °C 59 % 31 km/h 1.8 mm Low 6
1 Jul 32.5 °C 32 % 20 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
2 Jul 32.3 °C 28 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
3 Jul 31.5 °C 33 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
4 Jul 31.4 °C 33 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
5 Jul 27.7 °C 37 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
6 Jul 26.1 °C 49 % 32 km/h 0.1 mm High 22
7 Jul 29.9 °C 34 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
8 Jul 31.3 °C 33 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
9 Jul after 25.8 °C 51 % 36 km/h 0.6 mm High 24
10 Jul after 19.8 °C 60 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
11 Jul after 18.1 °C 44 % 38 km/h 0.1 mm Moderate 20
12 Jul after 23.3 °C 40 % 18 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
13 Jul after 26.4 °C 33 % 20 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
14 Jul after 28.7 °C 31 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
15 Jul after 24.2 °C 53 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
16 Jul after 21.4 °C 46 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
17 Jul after 26.4 °C 29 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
18 Jul after 24.6 °C 35 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 28

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 18 Jun 2021
After · 15 Jul 2021

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 · 1,048Every 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

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Kobyaysky Ulus fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 25 June 2021 to 8 July 2021 (14 days). The perimeter dates it from 28 June 2021 to 8 July 2021.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 8,788 hectares (87.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Kobyaysky Ulus (8,276 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 32.5 °C, humidity dropped to 26 % and gusts hit 38 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 30, 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

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Start date: 28 June 2021 → 25 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.

Report an error
What do you think is wrong?

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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 28 June 2021 to 8 July 2021. 1,048 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.