How long did the Melawi fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 28 August 2026 and 14 September 2026: 18 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 8,670 hectares (86.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Melawi (8,727 ha, 0.9 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 36.0 °C, humidity dropped to 31 % and gusts hit 35 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 33, class High.

Where does this data come from?

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

ID · Indonesia · 2026-08-28 → 2026-09-14

Melawi fire, 28 August 2026 Melawi

Out · last detection 13 Sept 2026, 18:21 UTC

The fire started on 28 August 2026 in Melawi, Indonesia, and satellites saw it burning for 18 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 8,670 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 22th largest in West Kalimantan since 2016 (of 268 with a page). Number 127 in Indonesia in 2026, of 1024.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Melawi · 2026 Melawi · 2026 Melawi · 2026 Melawi · 2026

Burnt area: 8,670ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 18days; 28 Aug 2026 – 14 Sept 2026
Municipalities hit: 1; regencies
Started on: 28 Aug; 2026
Heat detections: 321; in a single hotspot: 96 MW
Danger at start: 21; Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power: 309MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 28 Aug14 Sept

Play back 13 Sept 2026

How it evolved, day by day

28 Aug 29 Aug 30 Aug 3 Sept 5 Sept 7 Sept 9 Sept 11 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

35km/h · peak gust

31%lowest humidity

It had gone 7 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 4.1 mm on 21 Sept.

This area had burned before

25% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 373 ha in 2016, 1,119 ha in 2019, 215 ha in 2024, 478 ha in 2025.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 5.5% of the area of London (87 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

Melawi where it started

8,727 ha reached on 28 Aug

0.9 %

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 2025

Built-up area2.0 ha

Residents≈ 650

Inside the perimeter there were about 2.0 hectares of built-up land and about 650 residents (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

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)
7 Aug	33.6 °C	43 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 21
8 Aug	33.5 °C	42 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 21
9 Aug	32.4 °C	44 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 22
10 Aug	33.0 °C	44 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	High 23
11 Aug	33.3 °C	44 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	High 22
12 Aug	33.5 °C	44 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 22
13 Aug	32.8 °C	51 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
14 Aug	33.6 °C	49 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
15 Aug	31.6 °C	56 %	25 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 18
16 Aug	34.2 °C	43 %	20 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 19
17 Aug	34.7 °C	41 %	22 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
18 Aug	34.7 °C	38 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 24
19 Aug	34.6 °C	40 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
20 Aug	33.8 °C	44 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
21 Aug	34.3 °C	42 %	25 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
22 Aug	33.8 °C	47 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
23 Aug	33.5 °C	49 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 23
24 Aug	32.4 °C	52 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
25 Aug	33.5 °C	45 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
26 Aug	34.4 °C	41 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
27 Aug	34.0 °C	41 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
28 Aug	34.1 °C	31 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
29 Aug	34.5 °C	33 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
30 Aug	36.0 °C	32 %	20 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
31 Aug	35.8 °C	38 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
1 Sept	35.2 °C	35 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
2 Sept	33.9 °C	39 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
3 Sept	33.7 °C	44 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
4 Sept	32.0 °C	54 %	23 km/h	0.1 mm	High 23
5 Sept	32.2 °C	49 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 23
6 Sept	33.2 °C	46 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 24
7 Sept	31.0 °C	59 %	29 km/h	2.5 mm	Low 7
8 Sept	30.6 °C	62 %	18 km/h	3.7 mm	Very low 4
9 Sept	32.5 °C	49 %	32 km/h	0.5 mm	Moderate 14
10 Sept	33.8 °C	44 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
11 Sept	32.3 °C	51 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 21
12 Sept	33.2 °C	48 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
13 Sept	33.3 °C	52 %	30 km/h	0.3 mm	High 22
14 Sept	33.2 °C	50 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 23
15 Sept after	26.3 °C	74 %	22 km/h	0.8 mm	Low 9
16 Sept after	27.8 °C	71 %	10 km/h	0.1 mm	Low 9
17 Sept after	29.0 °C	65 %	16 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 11
18 Sept after	31.0 °C	58 %	13 km/h	0.2 mm	Moderate 13
19 Sept after	33.8 °C	45 %	18 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 19
20 Sept after	34.4 °C	45 %	19 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 21
21 Sept after	30.5 °C	70 %	28 km/h	4.1 mm	Very low 3

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 21 Aug 2026

After · 21 Sept 2026

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.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 30 August 2026 the air beside the fire reached 505 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 298: 20 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak505 µg/m³

Days over the guideline23 days

PM10516 µg/m³

Optical depth5.09

WHO 15

2627282930311234567891011121314151617

Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

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 · 321Every 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 Indonesia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Melawi fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 28 August 2026 and 14 September 2026: 18 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 8,670 hectares (86.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Melawi (8,727 ha, 0.9 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 36.0 °C, humidity dropped to 31 % and gusts hit 35 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 33, class High.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Indonesia (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 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?

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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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 321 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 2025, 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