Burned area
satellite only5,246ha
Perimeter published by GWIS (Copernicus).
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus)
- Date
- 1 Sept 2025 – 14 Sept 2025
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page to compare it with.
ZM · Zambia · –
Mpulungu fire, 1 September 2025 Nsama, Mpulungu
Out · last detection 14 Sept 2025, 10:58 UTC
The fire started on 1 September 2025 in Mpulungu, Zambia, and satellites saw it burning for 14 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,246 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.
Number 94 in Zambia in 2025, of 257.
GWIS near-real-time perimeter, from the layer that changed in August 2025: this fire is not compared with fires from earlier years, because since then the GWIS layer gives more and larger perimeters.
Use this data
Compare with…
Suggestions: Nsama · 2017Nsama · 2020Nsama · 2024Nsama · 2026
Use this data
Fire page data · version 2026-11-15matches the official recordwith caveatssatellite onlymodel
When copying, the sentence is
Tick the figures you want: they make up the lede and the CSV.
Duration by satellite
satellite only14days
1 Sept 2025 to 14 Sept 2025: first and last day with fire on the page.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- last detection: 14 Sept 2025, 10:58 UTC
+− cross-check
Satellites pass a few times a day and cloud or smoke can hide the fire: a lack of detections is not an official extinction. Each country’s emergency service declares a fire contained or out.
Start
satellite only1 Sept 2025
First day with fire seen by the satellites or the perimeter.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- 1 Sept 2025
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page, so the alert time and the cause are not known here.
Hotspots
satellite only111
VIIRS detections at 375 m. Most intense hotspot: 57 MW.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (Suomi NPP)
- Date
- 1 Sept 2025 – 14 Sept 2025
+− cross-check
There is no official record to compare with. Each hotspot is a pixel detected in one satellite pass, not a separate fire.
The worst day
satellite only333MW
Total radiative power on 6 September 2025; hotspots that day: 16.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (FRP)
- Date
- 6 Sept 2025
+− cross-check
Fire radiative power (FRP) measures the energy the fire gives off when the satellite passes. Added up by day, it compares intensity, not area.
Danger at the start
model47.2FWI · very high
Fire Weather Index (Canadian system) computed by WorldFires for the day the fire started. Consecutive days without rain before: 60.
- Source
- WorldFires calculation (Canadian FWI system)
- Date
- 1 Sept 2025, local noon
- Model
- ERA5 0,25° (ECMWF · Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com
+− cross-check
This is an index computed from weather model data, not a measurement of the fire nor an official warning. Danger warnings are issued by each country’s authority. Emergency number and official warnings
Weather during the fire
model32.9°C · 19% RH
High of 32.9 °C and minimum humidity of 19% on 9 September 2025; gusts of 36 km/h on 2 September 2025.
- Source
- weather model at the fire’s grid cell
- Date
- 1 Sept 2025 – 14 Sept 2025
- Model
- ERA5 0,25° (ECMWF · Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com
+− cross-check
These are model values for a cell of about 25 km, not from a weather station: they may differ from what was measured on the ground.
This page’s change log has been kept since 24 October 2026: every night what it publishes is compared and the difference is logged. Anything earlier is reconstructed from each source’s date and marked as reconstructed.
Show
-
logName: Nsama → Mpulungu.
-
· reconstructed weatherWeather and FWI computed from the ERA5 reanalysis
-
logStart date: 2 September 2025 → 1 September 2025.
Area logged each night
Move the slider to see which area the page published each day.
Versioned permanent link
https://worldfires.org/en/fire/mpulungu-2025-09-2?v=2026-11-15A version keeps the area, dates, name and official record; the area as it was logged (changes under 2% are not logged). The map, hotspots and weather always show today’s data.
Citation
A lede of about 60 words figures only, no adjectives
CSV for this fire mpulungu-2025-09-2.csv · daily, no individual hotspots
| fecha | focos_viirs | frp_mw | tmax_c | tmin_c | hr_min_pct | viento_max_kmh | racha_max_kmh | precip_mm | fwi | clase_fwi | dentro_del_incendio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-09-01 | 3 | 8 | 31.4 | 14.4 | 12 | 12.5 | 32.8 | 0 | 47.2 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2025-09-02 | 14 | 182 | 31.2 | 15.6 | 16 | 14.3 | 36 | 0 | 52.9 | extremo | 1 |
| 2025-09-03 | 11 | 113 | 31.1 | 16.8 | 18 | 16.2 | 35.3 | 0 | 51.7 | extremo | 1 |
| 2025-09-04 | 22 | 318 | 31.4 | 15.5 | 15 | 13.1 | 31.7 | 0 | 44.3 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2025-09-05 | 8 | 73 | 31.9 | 16.3 | 14 | 11.7 | 30.6 | 0 | 47.8 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2025-09-06 | 16 | 333 | 32.7 | 12.8 | 13 | 8.4 | 25.2 | 0 | 42.1 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2025-09-07 | 11 | 62 | 32.8 | 14.8 | 15 | 11.4 | 30.2 | 0 | 45 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2025-09-08 | 2 | 6 | 31.8 | 16.2 | 18 | 11.6 | 29.9 | 0 | 47.7 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2025-09-09 | 0 | 0 | 32.9 | 16.4 | 19 | 11.6 | 30.2 | 0 | 47.2 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2025-09-10 | 0 | 0 | 32.7 | 17.3 | 22 | 13.1 | 32.8 | 0 | 45.9 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2025-09-11 | 0 | 0 | 31.1 | 18.8 | 24 | 11.7 | 30.6 | 0 | 44.6 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2025-09-12 | 0 | 0 | 32.6 | 17.3 | 18 | 9.1 | 26.3 | 0 | 46.6 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2025-09-13 | 9 | 63 | 32.3 | 16 | 19 | 9.7 | 27 | 0 | 48 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2025-09-14 | 15 | 61 | 32 | 16.7 | 23 | 11.7 | 23.4 | 0 | 43.1 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2025-09-15 | 0 | 0 | 31.2 | 19.8 | 26 | 8.3 | 25.9 | 0 | 37.9 | alto | 0 |
| 2025-09-16 | 0 | 0 | 32.5 | 17.6 | 22 | 6.6 | 22 | 0 | 36.5 | alto | 0 |
| 2025-09-17 | 0 | 0 | 32.5 | 16.8 | 25 | 5.6 | 19.4 | 0 | 36.7 | alto | 0 |
| 2025-09-18 | 0 | 0 | 33.7 | 16.8 | 15 | 6.7 | 22.3 | 0 | 40.9 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2025-09-19 | 0 | 0 | 33.2 | 18.8 | 27 | 13.7 | 34.9 | 0 | 47.3 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2025-09-20 | 0 | 0 | 33 | 19.9 | 19 | 17.4 | 42.1 | 0 | 62.1 | extremo | 0 |
| 2025-09-21 | 0 | 0 | 30.7 | 18.9 | 24 | 15.6 | 37.4 | 0 | 54.1 | extremo | 0 |
| 2025-09-22 | 0 | 0 | 32.6 | 18.5 | 21 | 11.7 | 31.3 | 0 | 46.2 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2025-09-23 | 0 | 0 | 33.8 | 18.4 | 18 | 11 | 29.5 | 0 | 45.4 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2025-09-24 | 0 | 0 | 33.4 | 20.3 | 20 | 10.1 | 27 | 0 | 40.9 | muy_alto | 0 |
It is generated in your browser from this page’s data: one file per fire, aggregated by day and without individual hotspots.
Live widget for your story
It updates itself while the fire is still active and links to this page. Free, with the attribution shown at the bottom.
Sources for this page: GWIS (Copernicus), NASA FIRMS (VIIRS), ERA5 (ECMWF/Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0). Open-Meteo.com · How we build fire pages: methodology
- Burnt area
- 5,246ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 14days
- 1 Sept 2025 – 14 Sept 2025
- Municipalities hit
- 2
- districts
- Started on
- 1 Sept
- 2025
- Heat detections
- 111
- in a single hotspot: 57 MW
- Danger at start
- 47
- Very high · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 122MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
HOTSPOTS BY DAY
1 Sept14 Sept
14 Sept 2025
How it evolved, day by day
1 Sept
3 Sept
6 Sept
13 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
33°high
36km/h · peak gust
12%lowest humidity
It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.
This area had burned before
79% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 691 ha in 2016, 2,050 ha in 2017, 1,377 ha in 2019, 1,250 ha in 2020, 875 ha in 2021, 711 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 4,161 ha that had burned before.
- 1,538 ha Nsama fire, August 2017 3,488 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 1,250 ha Nsama fire, September 2020 3,267 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 289 ha Nsama fire, August 2024 10,178 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
-
4,891 ha0.6 %
-
Mpulungu where it started388 ha0.0 %
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.
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)
Started with Very dry air: 4.4 % of the area in Zambia 60 days without rain: 91 % of the area in Zambia
| Day | High | Min. humidity | Peak gust | Rain | Danger (FWI) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Sept | 31.4 °C | 12 % | 33 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 47 |
| 2 Sept | 31.2 °C | 16 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 53 |
| 3 Sept | 31.1 °C | 18 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 52 |
| 4 Sept | 31.4 °C | 15 % | 32 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 5 Sept | 31.9 °C | 14 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 48 |
| 6 Sept | 32.7 °C | 13 % | 25 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 42 |
| 7 Sept | 32.8 °C | 15 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 45 |
| 8 Sept | 31.8 °C | 18 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 48 |
| 9 Sept | 32.9 °C | 19 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 47 |
| 10 Sept | 32.7 °C | 22 % | 33 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 46 |
| 11 Sept | 31.1 °C | 24 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 45 |
| 12 Sept | 32.6 °C | 18 % | 26 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 47 |
| 13 Sept | 32.3 °C | 19 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 48 |
| 14 Sept | 32.0 °C | 23 % | 23 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 43 |
| 15 Sept after | 31.2 °C | 26 % | 26 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 38 |
| 16 Sept after | 32.5 °C | 22 % | 22 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 36 |
| 17 Sept after | 32.5 °C | 25 % | 19 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 37 |
| 18 Sept after | 33.7 °C | 15 % | 22 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 41 |
| 19 Sept after | 33.2 °C | 27 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 47 |
| 20 Sept after | 33.0 °C | 19 % | 42 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 62 |
| 21 Sept after | 30.7 °C | 24 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 54 |
| 22 Sept after | 32.6 °C | 21 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 46 |
| 23 Sept after | 33.8 °C | 18 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 45 |
| 24 Sept after | 33.4 °C | 20 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 41 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
↔
Before · 25 Aug 2025
After · 21 Sept 2025
Sentinel-2 did not pass over on that day. Try another date, or use false colour, which is daily.
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 9 September 2025 the air beside the fire reached 87 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 46: 3.1 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
PM2.5 peak87 µg/m³
Days over the guideline16 days
PM1089 µg/m³
Optical depth1.18
WHO 15
31 Aug4 Sept8 Sept12 Sept16 Sept
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 · 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
- 10,806 haNsama29 August 2026 · 17 days · 11 km away
- 10,178 haNsamaAugust 2024 · 20 days · 11 km away
- 14,487 haNsama24 July 2026 · 30 days · 26 km away
- 13,428 haMpulungu20 August 2019 · 27 days · 28 km away
- 15,945 haMpulungu6 September 2017 · 19 days · 30 km away
- 9,439 haMpulungu1 September 2020 · 19 days · 31 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Mpulungu fire last?
- According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 1 September 2025 to 14 September 2025 (14 days). The perimeter dates it from 2 September 2025 to 14 September 2025.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 5,246 hectares (52.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 2 municipalities: Nsama (4,891 ha, 0.6 %); Mpulungu (388 ha, 0.0 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 32.9 °C, humidity dropped to 12 % and gusts hit 36 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 53, class Extreme.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Zambia (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 · 2 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
- Name: Nsama → Mpulungu.
- Start date: 2 September 2025 → 1 September 2025.
RSS Changes to this page With cross-checks and a citable version
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 2 September 2025 to 14 September 2025. 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.
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 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)). 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.