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Lucapa fire, 6 July 2019 Lucapa

Out · last detection 12 Jul 2019, 00:00 UTC

The fire started on 6 July 2019 in Lucapa, Angola, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 8,394 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 123th largest in Lunda Norte since 2016 (of 411 with a page). Number 75 in Angola in 2019, of 207.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Lucapa · 2017Lucapa · 2018Lucapa · 2018Lucapa · 2026

Burnt area
8,394ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
6days
6 Jul 2019 – 11 Jul 2019
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
6 Jul
2019
Heat detections
275
in a single hotspot: 389 MW
Danger at start
48
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
1.9GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 6 Jul11 Jul
12 Jul 2019

How it evolved, day by day

6 Jul 2019 · 29 MW · 8 7 Jul 2019 · 191 MW · 29 8 Jul 2019 · 282 MW · 40 9 Jul 2019 · 273 MW · 18 10 Jul 2019 · 12,469 MW · 178 11 Jul 2019 · 1 MW · 1 12 Jul 2019 · 1 MW · 1
6 Jul 7 Jul 8 Jul 9 Jul 10 Jul 11 Jul 12 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
44km/h · peak gust
13%lowest humidity

It had gone 45 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

57% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,607 ha in 2016, 2,845 ha in 2017, 1,069 ha in 2018. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 4,777 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 5.3% of the area of London (84 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. Lucapa where it started
    8,441 ha reached on 6 Jul
    0.4 %

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)
7 Jul 31.4 °C 16 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
8 Jul 31.0 °C 13 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
9 Jul 31.5 °C 14 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
10 Jul 30.9 °C 20 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
11 Jul 32.2 °C 20 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
12 Jul after 30.7 °C 19 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
13 Jul after 26.9 °C 43 % 23 km/h 0.2 mm High 28
14 Jul after 29.8 °C 34 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
15 Jul after 32.0 °C 18 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
16 Jul after 30.4 °C 20 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
17 Jul after 30.5 °C 20 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
18 Jul after 31.0 °C 15 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
19 Jul after 30.6 °C 16 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
20 Jul after 31.1 °C 17 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
21 Jul after 30.9 °C 17 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 29 Jun 2019
After · 18 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 · 275Every 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 Lucapa fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 6 July 2019 to 11 July 2019 (6 days). The perimeter dates it from 7 July 2019 to 11 July 2019.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 8,394 hectares (83.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Lucapa (8,441 ha, 0.4 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 32.2 °C, humidity dropped to 13 % and gusts hit 44 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. Start date: 7 July 2019 → 6 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 7 July 2019 to 11 July 2019. 275 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.