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Namarrói fire, 5 September 2016 Namarrói

Out · last detection 27 Sept 2016, 10:41 UTC

The fire started on 5 September 2016 in Namarrói, Mozambique, and satellites saw it burning for 22 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 12,930 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 122th largest in Zambézia since 2016 (of 839 with a page). Number 14 in Mozambique in 2016, of 194.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Namarrói · 2026Namarrói · 2025Namarrói · 2018Lugela · 2020

Burnt area
12,930ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
22days
5 Sept 2016 – 26 Sept 2016
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
5 Sept
2016
Heat detections
764
in a single hotspot: 0 MW
Danger at start
23
High · FWI index
Average daily power
396MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 5 Sept26 Sept
27 Sept 2016

How it evolved, day by day

5 Sept 2016 · 17 MW · 4 6 Sept 2016 · 20 MW · 5 7 Sept 2016 · 312 MW · 27 8 Sept 2016 · 339 MW · 26 9 Sept 2016 · 738 MW · 33 10 Sept 2016 · 561 MW · 43 11 Sept 2016 · 631 MW · 36 12 Sept 2016 · 644 MW · 49 13 Sept 2016 · 1,331 MW · 125 14 Sept 2016 · 454 MW · 49 15 Sept 2016 · 583 MW · 34 16 Sept 2016 · 525 MW · 51 17 Sept 2016 · 321 MW · 42 18 Sept 2016 · 718 MW · 85 19 Sept 2016 · 204 MW · 18 21 Sept 2016 · 167 MW · 15 22 Sept 2016 · 105 MW · 12 23 Sept 2016 · 653 MW · 60 24 Sept 2016 · 125 MW · 15 25 Sept 2016 · 98 MW · 11 26 Sept 2016 · 141 MW · 22 27 Sept 2016 · 30 MW · 2
5 Sept 9 Sept 13 Sept 17 Sept 22 Sept 26 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

34°high
39km/h · peak gust
20%lowest humidity

It had gone 11 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 11.9 mm on 3 Oct.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 8.2% of the area of London (129 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. Namarrói where it started
    12,992 ha
    4.2 %

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 2015
Built-up area24 ha
Residents≈ 4,500

Inside the perimeter there were about 24 hectares of built-up land and about 4,500 residents (GHSL 2015, 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)
5 Sept 28.1 °C 34 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
6 Sept 29.5 °C 34 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
7 Sept 29.5 °C 34 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
8 Sept 31.6 °C 30 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
9 Sept 31.6 °C 20 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
10 Sept 32.2 °C 26 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
11 Sept 29.9 °C 33 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
12 Sept 28.7 °C 36 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
13 Sept 30.5 °C 28 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
14 Sept 29.5 °C 37 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
15 Sept 30.0 °C 32 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
16 Sept 31.9 °C 29 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
17 Sept 32.7 °C 25 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
18 Sept 31.6 °C 21 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
19 Sept 29.0 °C 36 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
20 Sept 26.4 °C 47 % 39 km/h 0.6 mm High 24
21 Sept 29.5 °C 32 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
22 Sept 30.8 °C 30 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
23 Sept 32.3 °C 26 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
24 Sept 32.6 °C 23 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
25 Sept 34.0 °C 22 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
26 Sept 29.8 °C 32 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
27 Sept after 31.4 °C 28 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
28 Sept after 33.0 °C 24 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
29 Sept after 31.6 °C 33 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
30 Sept after 32.3 °C 24 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
1 Oct after 33.2 °C 26 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
2 Oct after 33.2 °C 29 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
3 Oct after 28.1 °C 49 % 45 km/h 11.9 mm Low 6

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 29 Aug 2016
After · 3 Oct 2016

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 · 0Every 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 Mozambique ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Namarrói fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 5 September 2016 and 26 September 2016: 22 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 12,930 hectares (129.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Namarrói (12,992 ha, 4.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 34.0 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 39 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 Mozambique (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 · 4 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 2 October 2016 → 26 September 2016.
  2. Start date: 31 August 2016 → 5 September 2016.
  3. Last day with fire: 26 September 2016 → 2 October 2016.
  4. Start date: 5 September 2016 → 31 August 2016.

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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How we know this
  • Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery; 3 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. No 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 2015, 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.