Mafinga fire, September 2025 Mafinga
The fire started on 2 September 2025 in Mafinga, Zambia, and satellites saw it burning for 30 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 15,016 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 55th largest in Muchinga since 2016 (of 516 with a page). Number 29 in Zambia in 2025, of 271.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 15,016ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 30days
- 2 Sept 2025 – 1 Oct 2025
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- districts
- Started on
- 2 Sept
- 2025
- Heat detections
- 491
- in a single hotspot: 88 MW
- Danger at start
- 40
- Very high · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 172MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
It had gone 43 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 5.9 mm on 2 Oct.
This area had burned before
89% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 7,695 ha in 2016, 4,733 ha in 2017, 4,345 ha in 2018, 1,360 ha in 2019, 5,722 ha in 2020, 3,451 ha in 2021, 4,977 ha in 2022, 4,041 ha in 2023, 1,472 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 13,311 ha that had burned before.
- 4,977 ha Mafinga fire, October 2022 5,541 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 4,345 ha Mafinga fire, September 2018 7,197 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 4,041 ha Mafinga fire, September 2023 4,543 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 2,990 ha Mafinga fire, September 2016 3,241 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 2,603 ha Mafinga fire, October 2016 4,395 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 411 ha Mafinga fire, October 2017 20,303 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
Mafinga where it started15,119 ha reached on 1 Sept3.6 %
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.
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 Sept | 29.4 °C | 22 % | 28 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 40 |
| 3 Sept | 29.6 °C | 21 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 39 |
| 4 Sept | 29.9 °C | 14 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 42 |
| 5 Sept | 29.8 °C | 16 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 41 |
| 6 Sept | 30.3 °C | 20 % | 25 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 41 |
| 7 Sept | 29.6 °C | 18 % | 29 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 42 |
| 8 Sept | 30.6 °C | 20 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 43 |
| 9 Sept | 30.4 °C | 25 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 40 |
| 10 Sept | 30.1 °C | 26 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 41 |
| 11 Sept | 31.1 °C | 19 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 41 |
| 12 Sept | 30.5 °C | 17 % | 32 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 43 |
| 13 Sept | 30.7 °C | 19 % | 28 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 41 |
| 14 Sept | 30.7 °C | 23 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 40 |
| 15 Sept | 28.9 °C | 33 % | 24 km/h | 0.7 mm | High 27 |
| 16 Sept | 31.4 °C | 15 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 39 |
| 17 Sept | 31.5 °C | 18 % | 32 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 40 |
| 18 Sept | 31.2 °C | 22 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 40 |
| 19 Sept | 31.5 °C | 25 % | 38 km/h | 0.2 mm | Very high 43 |
| 20 Sept | 29.5 °C | 29 % | 47 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 21 Sept | 29.5 °C | 30 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 39 |
| 22 Sept | 31.2 °C | 24 % | 33 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 36 |
| 23 Sept | 32.3 °C | 21 % | 33 km/h | 0.1 mm | Very high 40 |
| 24 Sept | 31.4 °C | 20 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 41 |
| 25 Sept | 32.0 °C | 20 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 39 |
| 26 Sept | 31.7 °C | 21 % | 32 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 39 |
| 27 Sept | 31.7 °C | 21 % | 27 km/h | 0.1 mm | Very high 39 |
| 28 Sept | 33.3 °C | 16 % | 32 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 43 |
| 29 Sept | 33.8 °C | 16 % | 33 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 30 Sept | 33.1 °C | 23 % | 27 km/h | 0.2 mm | Very high 43 |
| 1 Oct | 28.5 °C | 43 % | 29 km/h | 1.2 mm | Moderate 18 |
| 2 Oct after | 27.7 °C | 45 % | 30 km/h | 5.9 mm | Very low 5 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
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 · CopernicusOn 15 September 2025 the air beside the fire reached 41 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 32: 2.1 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
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 · 491Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 7,699 haMafinga15 October 2017 · 12 days · 18 km away
- 20,303 haMafinga16 October 2017 · 10 days · 23 km away
- 11,134 haMafinga11 October 2017 · 11 days · 26 km away
- 21,909 haMafinga 6 October 2026 · 19 days · 28 km away
- 21,255 haMafinga9 October 2016 · 15 days · 29 km away
- 13,496 haMafingaOctober 2019 · 13 days · 29 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Mafinga fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 2 September 2025 and 1 October 2025: 30 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 15,016 hectares (150.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Mafinga (15,119 ha, 3.6 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 33.8 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 47 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 44, class Very 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
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.
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
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. 491 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.
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.