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Lugela fire, 2 October 2017 Lugela

Out · last detection 28 Oct 2017, 11:56 UTC

The fire started on 2 October 2017 in Lugela, Mozambique, and satellites saw it burning for 27 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 31,184 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 52th largest in Zambézia since 2016 (of 839 with a page). Number 6 in Mozambique in 2017, of 196.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Lugela · 2026Lugela · 2026Lugela · 2025Lugela · 2022

Burnt area
31,184ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
27days
2 Oct 2017 – 28 Oct 2017
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
2 Oct
2017
Heat detections
1,769
in a single hotspot: 0 MW
Danger at start
20
Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power
804MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 2 Oct28 Oct
28 Oct 2017

How it evolved, day by day

2 Oct 2017 · 47 MW · 9 3 Oct 2017 · 74 MW · 5 4 Oct 2017 · 344 MW · 33 5 Oct 2017 · 151 MW · 24 6 Oct 2017 · 174 MW · 29 7 Oct 2017 · 33 MW · 11 8 Oct 2017 · 189 MW · 24 9 Oct 2017 · 302 MW · 40 10 Oct 2017 · 686 MW · 40 11 Oct 2017 · 120 MW · 21 13 Oct 2017 · 292 MW · 40 14 Oct 2017 · 60 MW · 9 15 Oct 2017 · 144 MW · 21 16 Oct 2017 · 653 MW · 68 17 Oct 2017 · 2,750 MW · 260 18 Oct 2017 · 1,641 MW · 153 19 Oct 2017 · 892 MW · 60 20 Oct 2017 · 2,449 MW · 238 21 Oct 2017 · 2,210 MW · 144 22 Oct 2017 · 780 MW · 25 23 Oct 2017 · 962 MW · 92 24 Oct 2017 · 2,999 MW · 160 25 Oct 2017 · 401 MW · 54 26 Oct 2017 · 1,269 MW · 107 27 Oct 2017 · 1,182 MW · 93 28 Oct 2017 · 99 MW · 9
2 Oct 6 Oct 10 Oct 15 Oct 19 Oct 23 Oct 24 Oct 27 Oct

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

The weather it burned in

39°high
47km/h · peak gust
14%lowest humidity

It had gone 2 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 11.8 mm on 29 Oct.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 20% of the area of London (312 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. Lugela where it started
    31,349 ha
    5.1 %

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 2015
Built-up area7.6 ha
Residents≈ 4,900

Inside the perimeter there were about 7.6 hectares of built-up land and about 4,900 residents (GHSL 2015, 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)
2 Oct 29.4 °C 45 % 26 km/h 0.2 mm Moderate 20
3 Oct 31.4 °C 33 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
4 Oct 32.1 °C 34 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
5 Oct 35.4 °C 18 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
6 Oct 35.0 °C 23 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
7 Oct 34.9 °C 23 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
8 Oct 34.0 °C 25 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
9 Oct 34.8 °C 26 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
10 Oct 35.3 °C 27 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
11 Oct 35.8 °C 29 % 47 km/h 0.3 mm Very high 44
12 Oct 28.8 °C 58 % 38 km/h 2.7 mm Low 8
13 Oct 29.5 °C 27 % 44 km/h 0.4 mm High 29
14 Oct 24.7 °C 48 % 36 km/h 0.5 mm High 23
15 Oct 30.0 °C 29 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
16 Oct 36.3 °C 14 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
17 Oct 38.4 °C 14 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
18 Oct 37.2 °C 20 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
19 Oct 34.6 °C 35 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
20 Oct 37.9 °C 16 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
21 Oct 34.5 °C 26 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
22 Oct 31.6 °C 51 % 39 km/h 1.7 mm Moderate 14
23 Oct 32.1 °C 36 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
24 Oct 34.6 °C 23 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
25 Oct 36.0 °C 25 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
26 Oct 37.5 °C 21 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
27 Oct 38.9 °C 18 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
28 Oct 32.7 °C 43 % 40 km/h 7.3 mm Low 8
29 Oct after 23.4 °C 71 % 46 km/h 11.8 mm Very low 0

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 25 Sept 2017
After · 4 Nov 2017

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 · 0Every 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 Mozambique ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Lugela fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 2 October 2017 and 28 October 2017: 27 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 31,184 hectares (311.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Lugela (31,349 ha, 5.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 38.9 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 47 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 55, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Mozambique (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 · 2 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Start date: 25 September 2017 → 2 October 2017.
  2. Start date: 2 October 2017 → 25 September 2017.

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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. No 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 2015, 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.