How long did the Lupososhi fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 14 July 2019 and 16 July 2019: 3 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 3,582 hectares (35.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Lupososhi (3,607 ha, 0.9 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 26.6 °C, humidity dropped to 30 % and gusts hit 38 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 35, class High.

Where does this data come from?

From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Zambia (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

ZM · Zambia · 2019-07-14 → 2019-07-16

Lupososhi fire, July 2019 Lupososhi

Out · last detection 17 Jul 2019, 11:01 UTC

The fire started on 14 July 2019 in Lupososhi, Zambia, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 3,582 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 463th largest in Northern since 2016 (of 628 with a page). Number 188 in Zambia in 2019, of 243.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Lupososhi · 2016 Lupososhi · 2020

Burnt area: 3,582ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 3days; 14 Jul 2019 – 16 Jul 2019
Municipalities hit: 1; districts
Started on: 14 Jul; 2019
Heat detections: 92; in a single hotspot: 48 MW
Danger at start: 34; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 203MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 14 Jul16 Jul

Play back 17 Jul 2019

How it evolved, day by day

14 Jul 15 Jul 16 Jul 17 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

27°high

38km/h · peak gust

30%lowest humidity

It had gone 55 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

54% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 37 ha in 2017, 1,909 ha in 2018.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 2.3% of the area of London (36 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

Lupososhi where it started

3,607 ha reached on 14 Jul

0.9 %

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 area16 ha

Residents≈ 2,100

Inside the perimeter there were about 16 hectares of built-up land and about 2,100 residents (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	Danger (FWI)
14 Jul	26.6 °C	33 %	29 km/h	High 34
15 Jul	25.9 °C	30 %	35 km/h	High 35
16 Jul	25.7 °C	30 %	38 km/h	High 35
17 Jul after	25.5 °C	33 %	35 km/h	High 34
18 Jul after	25.2 °C	31 %	33 km/h	High 33
19 Jul after	25.9 °C	31 %	33 km/h	High 33
20 Jul after	27.1 °C	31 %	27 km/h	High 33
21 Jul after	27.5 °C	24 %	36 km/h	Very high 39
22 Jul after	24.7 °C	33 %	42 km/h	High 38
23 Jul after	25.0 °C	31 %	27 km/h	High 32
24 Jul after	26.5 °C	24 %	23 km/h	High 31
25 Jul after	27.4 °C	18 %	28 km/h	Very high 39
26 Jul after	26.1 °C	25 %	38 km/h	Very high 42

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 7 Jul 2019

After · 23 Jul 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 · 92Every 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 Zambia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Lupososhi fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 14 July 2019 and 16 July 2019: 3 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 3,582 hectares (35.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Lupososhi (3,607 ha, 0.9 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 26.6 °C, humidity dropped to 30 % and gusts hit 38 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 35, class High.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Zambia (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

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.

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What really happened?

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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. 92 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 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)). 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