How long did the Mbarali fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 17 September 2021 to 1 October 2021 (15 days). The perimeter dates it from 23 September 2021 to 1 October 2021.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 3,718 hectares (37.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Mbarali (3,738 ha, 0.3 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 30.7 °C, humidity dropped to 24 % and gusts hit 38 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 38, class Very high.

Where does this data come from?

From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Tanzania (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

TZ · Tanzania · 2021-09-17 → 2021-10-01

Mbarali fire, 17 September 2021 Mbarali

Out · last detection 1 Oct 2021, 10:31 UTC

The fire started on 17 September 2021 in Mbarali, Tanzania, and satellites saw it burning for 15 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 3,718 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 95th largest in Mbeya since 2016 (of 148 with a page). Number 89 in Tanzania in 2021, of 135.

The power measured by the satellite is low (27.5 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Mbarali · 2020 Iringa · 2017 Mbarali · 2021 Iringa · 2018

Burnt area: 3,718ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 15days; 17 Sept 2021 – 1 Oct 2021
Municipalities hit: 1; districts
Started on: 17 Sept; 2021
Heat detections: 103; in a single hotspot: 28 MW
Danger at start: 36; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 47MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 17 Sept1 Oct

Play back 1 Oct 2021

How it evolved, day by day

18 Sept 20 Sept 24 Sept 26 Sept 28 Sept 30 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

31°high

38km/h · peak gust

24%lowest humidity

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

This area had burned before

91% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 621 ha in 2016, 42 ha in 2017, 450 ha in 2018, 2,008 ha in 2019, 2,509 ha in 2020. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 3,378 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 2.3% of the area of London (37 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

Mbarali where it started

3,738 ha reached on 18 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	Danger (FWI)
23 Sept	28.6 °C	25 %	38 km/h	High 36
24 Sept	28.2 °C	24 %	36 km/h	Very high 38
25 Sept	28.9 °C	26 %	38 km/h	High 36
26 Sept	28.4 °C	27 %	37 km/h	High 36
27 Sept	29.7 °C	26 %	31 km/h	High 34
28 Sept	29.7 °C	30 %	29 km/h	High 34
29 Sept	29.3 °C	35 %	33 km/h	High 33
30 Sept	30.7 °C	26 %	37 km/h	High 36
1 Oct	28.7 °C	28 %	37 km/h	High 35
2 Oct after	29.5 °C	29 %	34 km/h	High 34
3 Oct after	30.5 °C	30 %	29 km/h	High 33
4 Oct after	29.0 °C	32 %	28 km/h	High 33
5 Oct after	30.6 °C	16 %	41 km/h	Very high 45
6 Oct after	28.5 °C	31 %	36 km/h	High 37
7 Oct after	31.3 °C	19 %	37 km/h	Very high 43
8 Oct after	30.7 °C	27 %	31 km/h	High 36
9 Oct after	30.7 °C	27 %	31 km/h	High 37
10 Oct after	30.0 °C	29 %	31 km/h	High 35
11 Oct after	29.7 °C	24 %	48 km/h	Very high 44

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 10 Sept 2021

After · 8 Oct 2021

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 · 103Every 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 Tanzania ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Mbarali fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 17 September 2021 to 1 October 2021 (15 days). The perimeter dates it from 23 September 2021 to 1 October 2021.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 3,718 hectares (37.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Mbarali (3,738 ha, 0.3 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 30.7 °C, humidity dropped to 24 % and gusts hit 38 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 38, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Tanzania (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

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.

27 October 2026 Start date: 23 September 2021 → 17 September 2021.

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?

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

What really happened?

Your connection to the fire (optional) Email (optional)

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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 23 September 2021 to 1 October 2021. 103 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 (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY 3.0 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