How long did the Lensky Ulus fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 15 July 2019 to 9 August 2019 (26 days). The perimeter dates it from 15 July 2019 to 2 August 2019.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,315 hectares (63.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Lensky Ulus (6,314 ha, 0.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 30.1 °C, humidity dropped to 30 % and gusts hit 60 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 22, 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 · 2019-07-15 → 2019-08-09

Lensky Ulus fire, 15 July 2019 Lensky Ulus

Out · last detection 9 Aug 2019, 19:32 UTC

The fire started on 15 July 2019 in Lensky Ulus, Russia, and satellites saw it burning for 26 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,315 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 776th largest in Sakha Republic since 2016 (of 1422 with a page). Number 284 in Russia in 2019, of 610.

The power measured by the satellite is low (25.2 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…

Suggestions: Lensky Ulus · 2019

Burnt area: 6,315ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 26days; 15 Jul 2019 – 9 Aug 2019
Municipalities hit: 1; districts
Started on: 15 Jul; 2019
Heat detections: 729; in a single hotspot: 25 MW
Danger at start: 12; Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power: 95MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 15 Jul9 Aug

Play back 9 Aug 2019

How it evolved, day by day

15 Jul 20 Jul 23 Jul 26 Jul 28 Jul 29 Jul 1 Aug 7 Aug

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

The weather it burned in

30°high

60km/h · peak gust

30%lowest humidity

It had gone one day without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 6.0 mm on 3 Aug.

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 4% of the area of London (63 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

Lensky Ulus where it started

6,314 ha reached on 15 Jul

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)
8 Jul	24.5 °C	49 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 12
9 Jul	26.4 °C	46 %	27 km/h	0.1 mm	Moderate 11
10 Jul	24.0 °C	59 %	29 km/h	3.8 mm	Very low 1
11 Jul	26.9 °C	47 %	26 km/h	0.1 mm	Low 5
12 Jul	26.6 °C	49 %	40 km/h	4.8 mm	Very low 3
13 Jul	18.9 °C	63 %	22 km/h	2.2 mm	Very low 1
14 Jul	22.4 °C	61 %	23 km/h	0.3 mm	Very low 2
15 Jul	24.1 °C	72 %	40 km/h	0.8 mm	Very low 4
16 Jul	26.4 °C	48 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Low 10
17 Jul	28.3 °C	44 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 12
18 Jul	19.5 °C	50 %	45 km/h	0.2 mm	Moderate 14
19 Jul	18.6 °C	34 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 16
20 Jul	18.9 °C	33 %	60 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
21 Jul	22.1 °C	32 %	53 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 21
22 Jul	24.6 °C	30 %	47 km/h	0.0 mm	High 22
23 Jul	26.6 °C	32 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	High 22
24 Jul	28.4 °C	31 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 21
25 Jul	27.6 °C	36 %	15 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 18
26 Jul	27.6 °C	38 %	18 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 19
27 Jul	27.3 °C	41 %	18 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 19
28 Jul	30.1 °C	34 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 22
29 Jul	23.2 °C	55 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 19
30 Jul	21.0 °C	45 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 17
31 Jul	23.2 °C	47 %	27 km/h	0.8 mm	Moderate 11
1 Aug	23.1 °C	56 %	32 km/h	0.4 mm	Moderate 12
2 Aug	23.1 °C	60 %	32 km/h	0.3 mm	Moderate 14
3 Aug	18.5 °C	72 %	47 km/h	6.0 mm	Very low 1

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 8 Jul 2019

After · 16 Aug 2019

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 · 729Every 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

5,993 haLensky Ulus20 July 2019 · 14 days · 21 km away

All fires in Russia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Lensky Ulus fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 15 July 2019 to 9 August 2019 (26 days). The perimeter dates it from 15 July 2019 to 2 August 2019.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,315 hectares (63.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Lensky Ulus (6,314 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 30.1 °C, humidity dropped to 30 % and gusts hit 60 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 22, 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 Last day with fire: 2 August 2019 → 9 August 2019.

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.
Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 15 July 2019 to 2 August 2019. 729 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