Skip to content
worldfires
en
CN · China · →

Nehe City fire, 11 April 2017 讷河市 · Nehe City

Out · last measured on 16 Apr 2017

The fire started on 11 April 2017 in Nehe City, China, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,743 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 773th largest in Heilongjiang Province since 2016 (of 1852 with a page). Number 81 in China in 2017, of 243.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Nehe City · 2026Nehe City · 2026Nehe City · 2026Nehe City · 2026

We have the GWIS perimeter for this fire, but the VIIRS sensors did not capture it in enough detail: no day-by-day evolution, but the split by municipality is there.

Burnt area
1,743ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
6days
11 Apr 2017 – 16 Apr 2017
Municipalities hit
1
counties
Started on
11 Apr
2017
Danger at start
16
Moderate · FWI index

Where it burned

The weather it burned in

17°high
70km/h · peak gust
13%lowest humidity

It had gone 4 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 8.3 mm on 17 Apr.

This area had burned before

37% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 802 ha in 2016. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 649 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1.1% of the area of London (17 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. Nehe City 讷河市 where it started
    1,748 ha
    0.3 %

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 area1.0 ha
Residents≈ 150

Inside the perimeter there were about 1.0 hectares of built-up land and about 150 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)
11 Apr 3.0 °C 16 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 16
12 Apr 3.9 °C 17 % 57 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
13 Apr 14.5 °C 29 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
14 Apr 17.0 °C 23 % 51 km/h 0.1 mm Moderate 18
15 Apr 13.3 °C 13 % 70 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
16 Apr 11.1 °C 18 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
17 Apr after 6.2 °C 37 % 35 km/h 8.3 mm Very low 0

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 4 Apr 2017
After · 23 Apr 2017

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

Other fires nearby

All fires in China ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Nehe City fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 11 April 2017 and 16 April 2017: 6 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 1,743 hectares (17.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Nehe City (1,748 ha, 0.3 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 17.0 °C, humidity dropped to 13 % and gusts hit 70 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 26, class High.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of China (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: 119 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

Satellite cross-check

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.

Report an error
What do you think is wrong?

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 119.

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. 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 ADM3 (Open Data Commons Open Database License 1.0). 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.