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Ngwathe fire, August 2020 Ngwathe

Out · last detection 25 Aug 2020, 12:43 UTC

The fire started on 25 August 2020 in Ngwathe, South Africa, and satellites saw it burning for 1 day. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,366 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 59th largest in Free State since 2016 (of 91 with a page). Number 62 in South Africa in 2020, of 95.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Moqhaka · 2018Moqhaka · 2018

Burnt area
2,366ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
1day
25 Aug 2020 – 25 Aug 2020
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
25 Aug
2020
Heat detections
57
in a single hotspot: 227 MW
Average daily power
3.4GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 25 Aug25 Aug

How it evolved, day by day

25 Aug 2020 · 3,372 MW · 55

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

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 1.5% of the area of London (24 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. Ngwathe where it started
    2,378 ha reached on 25 Aug
    0.3 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance is from the town centre to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 18 Aug 2020
After · 1 Sept 2020

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 · 57Every 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 Africa ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Ngwathe fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 25 August 2020 and 25 August 2020: 1 day 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 2,366 hectares (23.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Ngwathe (2,378 ha, 0.3 %).
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of South Africa (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: 10177 · 112

Satellite cross-check

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 10177 · 112.

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. 57 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.

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 (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.