How long did the Mbombela fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 13 August 2018 and 15 August 2018: 3 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 3,341 hectares (33.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Mbombela (3,355 ha, 0.5 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 30.7 °C, humidity dropped to 21 % and gusts hit 41 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 32, class High.

Where does this data come from?

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

ZA · South Africa · 2018-08-13 → 2018-08-15

Mbombela fire, August 2018 Mbombela

Out · last detection 15 Aug 2018, 23:52 UTC

The fire started on 13 August 2018 in Mbombela, South Africa, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 3,341 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 70th largest in Mpumalanga since 2016 (of 214 with a page). Number 40 in South Africa in 2018, of 96.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Mbombela · 2020 Mbombela · 2023 Mbombela · 2017 Mbombela · 2023

Burnt area: 3,341ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 3days; 13 Aug 2018 – 15 Aug 2018
Municipalities hit: 1; municipalities
Started on: 13 Aug; 2018
Heat detections: 111; in a single hotspot: 37 MW
Danger at start: 29; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 322MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 13 Aug15 Aug

Play back 15 Aug 2018

How it evolved, day by day

13 Aug 14 Aug 15 Aug

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

41km/h · peak gust

21%lowest humidity

It had gone 2 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 6.6 mm on 18 Aug.

This area had burned before

39% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,306 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 2.1% of the area of London (33 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

Mbombela where it started

3,355 ha reached on 13 Aug

0.5 %

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 area12 ha

Residents≈ 650

Inside the perimeter there were about 12 hectares of built-up land and about 650 residents (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)
13 Aug	30.7 °C	21 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 29
14 Aug	29.2 °C	24 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 29
15 Aug	27.2 °C	33 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
16 Aug after	24.4 °C	46 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 22
17 Aug after	31.7 °C	23 %	60 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
18 Aug after	13.9 °C	72 %	45 km/h	6.6 mm	Very low 0

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 6 Aug 2018

After · 22 Aug 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 · 111Every 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 South Africa ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Mbombela fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 13 August 2018 and 15 August 2018: 3 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 3,341 hectares (33.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Mbombela (3,355 ha, 0.5 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 30.7 °C, humidity dropped to 21 % and gusts hit 41 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 32, class High.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of South Africa (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: 10177 · 112 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

Satellite cross-check

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

History of this page Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

No changes since 24 October 2026.

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?

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 10177 · 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. 111 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 ADM3 (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