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SS · South Sudan · –

Nagero fire, 24 November 2025 Nagero

Out · last detection 4 Dec 2025, 23:22 UTC

The fire started on 24 November 2025 in Nagero, South Sudan, and satellites saw it burning for 10 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 26,217 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 33 in South Sudan in 2025, of 235.

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.

Compare with…
Burnt area
26,217ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
10days
24 Nov 2025 – 3 Dec 2025
Municipalities hit
1
counties
Started on
24 Nov
2025
Heat detections
714
in a single hotspot: 134 MW
Danger at start
31
High · FWI index
Average daily power
687MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 24 Nov3 Dec
4 Dec 2025

How it evolved, day by day

24 Nov 2025 · 139 MW · 13 25 Nov 2025 · 105 MW · 18 26 Nov 2025 · 1,147 MW · 133 27 Nov 2025 · 2,198 MW · 190 28 Nov 2025 · 447 MW · 128 29 Nov 2025 · 1,259 MW · 45 30 Nov 2025 · 139 MW · 26 1 Dec 2025 · 591 MW · 28 2 Dec 2025 · 1,228 MW · 100 3 Dec 2025 · 273 MW · 28 4 Dec 2025 · 28 MW · 5
24 Nov 27 Nov 30 Nov 3 Dec

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
41km/h · peak gust
17%lowest humidity

It had gone 17 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

100% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 11,378 ha in 2016, 6,966 ha in 2017, 5,248 ha in 2018, 8,549 ha in 2019, 13,000 ha in 2020, 7,966 ha in 2021, 9,185 ha in 2022, 10,476 ha in 2023, 13,693 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 26,122 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 17% of the area of London (262 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. Nagero where it started
    26,394 ha reached on 24 Nov
    2.8 %

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 area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (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)
24 Nov 35.7 °C 21 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
25 Nov 35.6 °C 22 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
26 Nov 34.8 °C 24 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
27 Nov 35.0 °C 23 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
28 Nov 35.1 °C 26 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
29 Nov 34.9 °C 24 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
30 Nov 36.5 °C 22 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
1 Dec 35.7 °C 23 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
2 Dec 35.7 °C 19 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
3 Dec 34.6 °C 17 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
4 Dec after 35.6 °C 19 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
5 Dec after 34.5 °C 25 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
6 Dec after 35.4 °C 19 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
7 Dec after 34.9 °C 29 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
8 Dec after 35.6 °C 26 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
9 Dec after 33.4 °C 31 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
10 Dec after 33.3 °C 28 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
11 Dec after 33.3 °C 21 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
12 Dec after 33.2 °C 20 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
13 Dec after 32.5 °C 21 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 17 Nov 2025
After · 10 Dec 2025

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 28 November 2025 the air beside the fire reached 101 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 66: 4.4 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak101 µg/m³
Days over the guideline13 days
PM10103 µg/m³
Optical depth0.89
22 Nov25 Nov28 Nov1 Dec4 Dec
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 · 714Every 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 South Sudan

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Nagero fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 24 November 2025 to 3 December 2025 (10 days). The perimeter dates it from 24 November 2025 to 1 December 2025.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 26,217 hectares (262.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Nagero (26,394 ha, 2.8 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 36.5 °C, humidity dropped to 17 % and gusts hit 41 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 41, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of South Sudan (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: 1 December 2025 → 3 December 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.

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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 24 November 2025 to 1 December 2025. 714 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.