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Lubalo fire, 1 July 2019 Lubalo

Out · last detection 20 Jul 2019, 11:46 UTC

The fire started on 1 July 2019 in Lubalo, Angola, and satellites saw it burning for 19 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 10,162 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 87th largest in Lunda Norte since 2016 (of 411 with a page). Number 54 in Angola in 2019, of 207.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Lubalo · 2026Lubalo · 2026Lubalo · 2026Lubalo · 2019

Burnt area
10,162ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
19days
1 Jul 2019 – 19 Jul 2019
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
1 Jul
2019
Heat detections
363
in a single hotspot: 323 MW
Danger at start
41
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
390MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Jul19 Jul
20 Jul 2019

How it evolved, day by day

1 Jul 2019 · 23 MW · 3 2 Jul 2019 · 1,349 MW · 34 3 Jul 2019 · 816 MW · 42 4 Jul 2019 · 126 MW · 13 5 Jul 2019 · 1,813 MW · 50 6 Jul 2019 · 655 MW · 39 7 Jul 2019 · 72 MW · 14 8 Jul 2019 · 209 MW · 34 9 Jul 2019 · 167 MW · 21 10 Jul 2019 · 161 MW · 28 11 Jul 2019 · 187 MW · 28 12 Jul 2019 · 136 MW · 28 13 Jul 2019 · 237 MW · 8 16 Jul 2019 · 59 MW · 7 19 Jul 2019 · 187 MW · 9 20 Jul 2019 · 42 MW · 5
1 Jul 4 Jul 5 Jul 7 Jul 10 Jul 13 Jul 20 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
51km/h · peak gust
13%lowest humidity

It had gone 47 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

49% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,352 ha in 2016, 4,061 ha in 2017, 117 ha in 2018. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 4,960 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 6.4% of the area of London (102 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. Lubalo where it started
    10,217 ha reached on 1 Jul
    0.7 %

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)
1 Jul 30.8 °C 20 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
2 Jul 30.4 °C 20 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
3 Jul 30.2 °C 22 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
4 Jul 31.6 °C 18 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
5 Jul 29.9 °C 22 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
6 Jul 30.4 °C 16 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
7 Jul 30.2 °C 18 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
8 Jul 29.8 °C 13 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
9 Jul 30.0 °C 14 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
10 Jul 30.3 °C 19 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
11 Jul 31.4 °C 17 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
12 Jul 30.2 °C 16 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
13 Jul 29.3 °C 21 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
14 Jul 29.8 °C 29 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
15 Jul 31.3 °C 18 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
16 Jul 30.7 °C 19 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
17 Jul 29.9 °C 16 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
18 Jul 30.4 °C 16 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
19 Jul 30.3 °C 16 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
20 Jul after 30.1 °C 17 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
21 Jul after 30.3 °C 16 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
22 Jul after 30.2 °C 16 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
23 Jul after 30.5 °C 15 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
24 Jul after 30.5 °C 13 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
25 Jul after 31.5 °C 14 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
26 Jul after 30.4 °C 12 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
27 Jul after 31.5 °C 12 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
28 Jul after 30.6 °C 14 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
29 Jul after 31.2 °C 14 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 24 Jun 2019
After · 26 Jul 2019

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 · 363Every 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

Other fires nearby

All fires in Angola ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Lubalo fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 1 July 2019 to 19 July 2019 (19 days). The perimeter dates it from 1 July 2019 to 12 July 2019.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 10,162 hectares (101.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Lubalo (10,217 ha, 0.7 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 31.6 °C, humidity dropped to 13 % and gusts hit 51 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 49, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Angola (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.

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. Last day with fire: 12 July 2019 → 19 July 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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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 1 July 2019 to 12 July 2019. 363 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 (Public Domain). 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.