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Mavinga fire, 28 September 2019 Mavinga

Out · last detection 9 Oct 2019, 13:06 UTC

The fire started on 28 September 2019 in Mavinga, Angola, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 14,067 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 93th largest in Cuando Cubango since 2016 (of 659 with a page). Number 25 in Angola in 2019, of 207.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Mavinga · 2016Mavinga · 2023Mavinga · 2019Mavinga · 2019

Burnt area
14,067ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
12days
28 Sept 2019 – 9 Oct 2019
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
28 Sept
2019
Heat detections
502
in a single hotspot: 349 MW
Danger at start
46
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
1.6GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 28 Sept9 Oct
9 Oct 2019

How it evolved, day by day

28 Sept 2019 · 1,727 MW · 31 29 Sept 2019 · 3,303 MW · 88 30 Sept 2019 · 4,545 MW · 108 1 Oct 2019 · 2,863 MW · 109 2 Oct 2019 · 761 MW · 50 3 Oct 2019 · 1,696 MW · 67 4 Oct 2019 · 531 MW · 18 5 Oct 2019 · 136 MW · 28 7 Oct 2019 · 6 MW · 1 9 Oct 2019 · 8 MW · 2
28 Sept 30 Sept 2 Oct 4 Oct 7 Oct

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

The weather it burned in

37°high
48km/h · peak gust
8%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.7 mm on 10 Oct.

This area had burned before

28% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 4,076 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 8.9% of the area of London (141 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. Mavinga where it started
    14,074 ha reached on 28 Sept
    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)
28 Sept 31.8 °C 15 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
29 Sept 34.0 °C 11 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
30 Sept 34.3 °C 9 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
1 Oct 33.2 °C 12 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
2 Oct 34.9 °C 8 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
3 Oct 36.1 °C 14 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
4 Oct 33.7 °C 21 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
5 Oct 32.5 °C 27 % 48 km/h 0.1 mm Very high 44
6 Oct 34.4 °C 20 % 41 km/h 0.2 mm Very high 45
7 Oct 35.7 °C 16 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
8 Oct 36.7 °C 13 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
9 Oct 32.1 °C 32 % 35 km/h 3.0 mm Moderate 14
10 Oct after 27.5 °C 38 % 28 km/h 2.7 mm Low 7

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 21 Sept 2019
After · 16 Oct 2019

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 · 502Every 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 Angola ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Mavinga fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 28 September 2019 to 9 October 2019 (12 days). The perimeter dates it from 28 September 2019 to 6 October 2019.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 14,067 hectares (140.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Mavinga (14,074 ha, 0.3 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 36.7 °C, humidity dropped to 8 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 57, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Angola (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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 6 October 2019 → 9 October 2019.

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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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 28 September 2019 to 6 October 2019. 502 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 (Public Domain). 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.