How long did the Liwale fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 31 August 2025 and 16 September 2025: 17 days between the first and last heat detection of the perimeter.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 8,810 hectares (88.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Liwale (8,890 ha, 0.3 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 30.4 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 36 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 39, class Very 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 · 2025-08-31 → 2025-09-16

Liwale fire, 31 August 2025 Liwale

Out · last detection 16 Sept 2025, 23:06 UTC

The fire started on 31 August 2025 in Liwale, Tanzania, and satellites saw it burning for 17 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 8,810 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 5th largest in Lindi since 2016 (of 69 with a page). Number 21 in Tanzania in 2025, of 161.

The power measured by the satellite is low (23.8 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: Liwale · 2017 Liwale · 2025 Liwale · 2026 Tunduru · 2017

Burnt area: 8,810ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 17days; 31 Aug 2025 – 16 Sept 2025
Municipalities hit: 1; districts
Started on: 31 Aug; 2025
Heat detections: 265; in a single hotspot: 24 MW
Danger at start: 37; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 77MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 31 Aug16 Sept

Play back 16 Sept 2025

How it evolved, day by day

31 Aug 3 Sept 5 Sept 6 Sept 9 Sept 12 Sept 15 Sept

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

36km/h · peak gust

20%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.3 mm on 18 Sept.

This area had burned before

35% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 3,053 ha in 2017.

3,053 ha Liwale fire, October 2017 14,838 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

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

Liwale where it started

8,890 ha reached on 31 Aug

0.3 %

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 2025

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable 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)
31 Aug	29.3 °C	20 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
1 Sept	29.8 °C	28 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
2 Sept	28.6 °C	30 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
3 Sept	27.4 °C	35 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
4 Sept	29.0 °C	26 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
5 Sept	30.2 °C	20 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
6 Sept	30.0 °C	23 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
7 Sept	28.8 °C	25 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
8 Sept	28.3 °C	39 %	27 km/h	0.1 mm	High 32
9 Sept	28.8 °C	38 %	27 km/h	0.1 mm	High 31
10 Sept	30.4 °C	25 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
11 Sept	29.5 °C	25 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
12 Sept	29.5 °C	28 %	22 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
13 Sept	30.3 °C	27 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
14 Sept	29.9 °C	31 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
15 Sept	27.6 °C	43 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
16 Sept	28.4 °C	37 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
17 Sept after	29.8 °C	34 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
18 Sept after	28.7 °C	53 %	29 km/h	2.3 mm	Low 10

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 24 Aug 2025

After · 23 Sept 2025

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.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 15 September 2025 the air beside the fire reached 31 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 16: 1.1 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak31 µg/m³

Days over the guideline1 day

PM1034 µg/m³

Optical depth0.79

WHO 15

29303112345678910111213141516171819

Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

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 · 265Every 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 Liwale fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 31 August 2025 and 16 September 2025: 17 days between the first and last heat detection of the perimeter.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 8,810 hectares (88.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Liwale (8,890 ha, 0.3 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 30.4 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 36 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 39, class Very 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 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

No changes since 24 October 2026.

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.
Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 265 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.

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