How long did the Mashare fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 13 September 2018 to 26 September 2018 (14 days). The perimeter dates it from 14 September 2018 to 26 September 2018.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 10,119 hectares (101.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Mashare (10,191 ha, 1.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 36.5 °C, humidity dropped to 6 % and gusts hit 46 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 70, class Very extreme.

Where does this data come from?

From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Namibia (OCHA COD-AB). It is not an official report.

NA · Namibia · 2018-09-13 → 2018-09-26

Mashare fire, 13 September 2018 Mashare

Out · last detection 26 Sept 2018, 12:52 UTC

The fire started on 13 September 2018 in Mashare, Namibia, and satellites saw it burning for 14 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 10,119 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 51th largest in Kavango East since 2016 (of 394 with a page). Number 12 in Namibia in 2018, of 83.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Mashare · 2016 Mashare · 2017 Mashare · 2026 Mashare · 2023

Burnt area: 10,119ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 14days; 13 Sept 2018 – 26 Sept 2018
Municipalities hit: 1; constituencies
Started on: 13 Sept; 2018
Heat detections: 430; in a single hotspot: 180 MW
Danger at start: 50; Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power: 467MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 13 Sept26 Sept

Play back 26 Sept 2018

How it evolved, day by day

13 Sept 15 Sept 17 Sept 19 Sept 21 Sept 23 Sept 25 Sept

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

The weather it burned in

36°high

46km/h · peak gust

6%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

54% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 3,419 ha in 2016, 2,124 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 6.4% of the area of London (101 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

Mashare where it started

10,191 ha reached on 13 Sept

1.1 %

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 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	Danger (FWI)
13 Sept	33.5 °C	9 %	30 km/h	Extreme 50
14 Sept	33.5 °C	6 %	42 km/h	Extreme 61
15 Sept	35.0 °C	8 %	34 km/h	Extreme 56
16 Sept	35.8 °C	8 %	32 km/h	Extreme 55
17 Sept	36.1 °C	10 %	40 km/h	Extreme 62
18 Sept	36.5 °C	12 %	44 km/h	Extreme 66
19 Sept	36.0 °C	13 %	28 km/h	Extreme 52
20 Sept	33.7 °C	12 %	46 km/h	Very extreme 70
21 Sept	34.8 °C	12 %	42 km/h	Extreme 63
22 Sept	35.1 °C	14 %	44 km/h	Extreme 63
23 Sept	35.0 °C	13 %	40 km/h	Extreme 60
24 Sept	34.7 °C	11 %	39 km/h	Extreme 60
25 Sept	35.2 °C	17 %	39 km/h	Extreme 57
26 Sept	35.5 °C	16 %	23 km/h	Very high 48
27 Sept after	35.4 °C	18 %	38 km/h	Extreme 54
28 Sept after	35.8 °C	15 %	32 km/h	Very high 49
29 Sept after	35.0 °C	16 %	51 km/h	Extreme 66
30 Sept after	33.4 °C	20 %	53 km/h	Extreme 65
1 Oct after	31.2 °C	23 %	46 km/h	Extreme 54
2 Oct after	32.5 °C	16 %	39 km/h	Very high 49
3 Oct after	33.8 °C	11 %	32 km/h	Very high 49
4 Oct after	33.4 °C	12 %	32 km/h	Very high 49
5 Oct after	33.6 °C	17 %	40 km/h	Extreme 56
6 Oct after	34.1 °C	14 %	42 km/h	Extreme 57

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 6 Sept 2018

After · 3 Oct 2018

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 · 430Every 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 Namibia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Mashare fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 13 September 2018 to 26 September 2018 (14 days). The perimeter dates it from 14 September 2018 to 26 September 2018.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 10,119 hectares (101.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Mashare (10,191 ha, 1.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 36.5 °C, humidity dropped to 6 % and gusts hit 46 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 70, class Very extreme.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Namibia (OCHA COD-AB). 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

26 October 2026 Start date: 14 September 2018 → 13 September 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.

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What do you think is wrong?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

What really happened?

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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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 14 September 2018 to 26 September 2018. 430 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 OCHA COD-AB (Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA)) (Creative Commons Attribution for Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY-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.

Where it burned