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Magdagachinsky District fire, 1 April 2018 Magdagachinsky District, Shimanovsky District

Out · last detection 6 Apr 2018, 17:41 UTC

The fire started on 1 April 2018 in Magdagachinsky District, Russia, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 12,140 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 130th largest in Amur Oblast since 2016 (of 535 with a page). Number 108 in Russia in 2018, of 540.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Magdagachinsky District · 2024Magdagachinsky District · 2024Shimanovsky District · 2024Shimanovsky District · 2024

Burnt area
12,140ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
6days
1 Apr 2018 – 6 Apr 2018
Municipalities hit
2
districts
Started on
1 Apr
2018
Heat detections
502
in a single hotspot: 0 MW
Danger at start
10
Low · FWI index
Average daily power
1.3GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Apr6 Apr
6 Apr 2018

How it evolved, day by day

1 Apr 2018 · 588 MW · 29 2 Apr 2018 · 211 MW · 50 3 Apr 2018 · 5,252 MW · 250 4 Apr 2018 · 1,166 MW · 117 5 Apr 2018 · 402 MW · 33 6 Apr 2018 · 169 MW · 23
1 Apr 2 Apr 3 Apr 4 Apr 5 Apr 6 Apr

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

The weather it burned in

14°high
77km/h · peak gust
14%lowest humidity

It had gone 4 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 7.7% of the area of London (121 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. Magdagachinsky District where it started
    7,954 ha
    0.5 %
  2. Shimanovsky District
    4,034 ha
    0.3 %

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 Apr 13.6 °C 34 % 60 km/h 0.0 mm Low 10
2 Apr 9.0 °C 31 % 77 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 13
3 Apr -1.3 °C 14 % 70 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 12
4 Apr -0.9 °C 14 % 61 km/h 0.0 mm Low 11
5 Apr 2.3 °C 14 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Low 10
6 Apr 3.9 °C 21 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Low 9
7 Apr after 2.0 °C 31 % 48 km/h 0.3 mm Low 8
8 Apr after 6.9 °C 23 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Low 8
9 Apr after 12.1 °C 5 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Low 10
10 Apr after 14.2 °C 15 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 11
11 Apr after 9.3 °C 34 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Low 11
12 Apr after 8.6 °C 18 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Low 10
13 Apr after 8.2 °C 18 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Low 11
14 Apr after 10.4 °C 15 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 12
15 Apr after 13.1 °C 2 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 15
16 Apr after 18.6 °C 11 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 25 Mar 2018
After · 13 Apr 2018

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 Russia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Magdagachinsky District fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 1 April 2018 and 6 April 2018: 6 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 12,140 hectares (121.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Magdagachinsky District (7,954 ha, 0.5 %); Shimanovsky District (4,034 ha, 0.3 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 13.6 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 77 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 13, class Moderate.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Russia (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.

Emergency number: 112 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

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: 30 March 2018 → 1 April 2018.
  2. Start date: 1 April 2018 → 30 March 2018.

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.

Report an error
What do you think is wrong?

We will only use your email to reply about this report. Privacy. This is not an emergency service: if there is a fire now, call 112.

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. 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 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 (Open Data Commons Open Database License 1.0). 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.