Kreminna fire, 1 May 2024 Кремінський район · Kreminna
The fire started on 1 May 2024 in Kreminna, Ukraine, and satellites saw it burning for 10 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 770 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.
We are reviewing this page: some of its data look inconsistent (the place, the dates or the area), so treat them with caution.
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- Burnt area
- 770ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- 10days
- 1 May 2024 – 10 May 2024
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- districts
- Started on
- 1 May
- 2024
- Heat detections
- 40
- in a single hotspot: 54 MW
- Danger at start
- 10
- Low · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 103MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
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 2 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.8 mm on 18 May.
This area had burned before
34% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 210 ha in 2022, 93 ha in 2023. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 259 ha that had burned before.
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
-
766 ha reached on 1 May0.5 %
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
- Coniferous forest91 %
- Mixed forest8.3 %
- Other natural land0.6 %
Land cover inside the perimeter as reported by Copernicus EFFIS (outside the Corine Land Cover area).
People and buildings inside the perimeter
GHSL 2025Inside the perimeter there were about 0.25 hectares of built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2025, 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. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.
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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 27 Apr | 26.3 °C | 39 % | 26 km/h | 0.8 mm | Low 10 |
| 28 Apr | 26.4 °C | 46 % | 37 km/h | 3.7 mm | Very low 3 |
| 29 Apr | 19.6 °C | 54 % | 44 km/h | 2.6 mm | Very low 3 |
| 30 Apr | 21.8 °C | 24 % | 46 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 11 |
| 1 May | 24.2 °C | 24 % | 24 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 13 |
| 2 May | 24.2 °C | 28 % | 45 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 18 |
| 3 May | 19.6 °C | 32 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 18 |
| 4 May | 13.1 °C | 20 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 18 |
| 5 May | 19.1 °C | 21 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 21 |
| 6 May | 24.0 °C | 32 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 20 |
| 7 May | 25.3 °C | 22 % | 58 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 30 |
| 8 May | 15.3 °C | 34 % | 40 km/h | 2.8 mm | Very low 4 |
| 9 May | 14.4 °C | 22 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 10 |
| 10 May | 17.1 °C | 19 % | 24 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 14 |
| 11 May after | 21.0 °C | 29 % | 41 km/h | 0.1 mm | Moderate 20 |
| 12 May after | 16.3 °C | 28 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 20 |
| 13 May after | 14.4 °C | 34 % | 43 km/h | 0.1 mm | Moderate 21 |
| 14 May after | 15.9 °C | 26 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 20 |
| 15 May after | 15.6 °C | 32 % | 44 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 22 |
| 16 May after | 16.0 °C | 26 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 19 |
| 17 May after | 16.0 °C | 35 % | 33 km/h | 0.1 mm | Moderate 19 |
| 18 May after | 21.4 °C | 41 % | 28 km/h | 1.8 mm | Low 6 |
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 6 May 2024 the air beside the fire reached 13 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 · 40Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 1,364 haKreminna Кремінський район3 May 2024 · 5 days · 5 km away
- 2,641 haLyman Лиманський район26 April 2022 · 8 days · 19 km away
- 1,902 haLyman Лиманський район1 April 2024 · 12 days · 20 km away
- 1,345 haSloviansk Слов'янський район23 May 2024 · 5 days · 32 km away
- 1,980 haNovoaidar Новоайдарський районFebruary 2024 · 5 days · 33 km away
- 1,488 haPopasna Попаснянський район8 July 2025 · 4 days · 33 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Kreminna fire last?
- According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 1 May 2024 to 10 May 2024 (10 days). The perimeter dates it from 1 May 2024 to 3 May 2024.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 770 hectares (7.7 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Kreminna (766 ha, 0.5 %).
- Did the fire reach a town?
- The fire started in Kreminna and came within 19.0 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 26.4 °C, humidity dropped to 19 % and gusts hit 58 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 30, class High.
- 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.
- Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 1 May 2024 to 3 May 2024. 40 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 2025, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.
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.