Mashare fire, 19 August 2024 Mashare
The fire started on 19 August 2024 in Mashare, Namibia, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,026 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 386th largest in Kavango East since 2016 (of 394 with a page). Number 43 in Namibia in 2024, of 43.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 2,026ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 6days
- 19 Aug 2024 – 24 Aug 2024
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- constituencies
- Started on
- 19 Aug
- 2024
- Heat detections
- 44
- in a single hotspot: 63 MW
- Average daily power
- 187MW
- 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.
This area had burned before
96% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 672 ha in 2017, 1,663 ha in 2019, 852 ha in 2020, 514 ha in 2021, 878 ha in 2023. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,939 ha that had burned before.
- 1,663 ha Mashare fire, August 2019 10,603 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 852 ha Mashare fire, September 2020 16,040 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 672 ha Mashare fire, August 2017 2,101 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 536 ha Mashare fire, September 2023 2,171 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 514 ha Mashare fire, September 2021 6,849 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 341 ha Mashare fire, September 2023 8,792 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
-
Mashare where it started2,042 ha reached on 20 Aug0.2 %
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 2025Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2025, 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. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.
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
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 24 August 2024 the air beside the fire reached 18 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO 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 · 44Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Mashare fire last?
- According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 19 August 2024 to 24 August 2024 (6 days). The perimeter dates it from 19 August 2024 to 21 August 2024.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 2,026 hectares (20.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Mashare (2,042 ha, 0.2 %).
- 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
History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
- Last day with fire: 21 August 2024 → 24 August 2024.
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.
- Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 19 August 2024 to 21 August 2024. 44 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
- We have not matched this page with any official record.
- Built-up area and population come from the JRC Global Human Settlement Layer (epoch 2025, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.
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.