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RU · Russia ·

Pallasovsky District fire, August 2026 Pallasovsky District

Out · last detection 12 Aug 2026, 10:58 UTC

The fire started on 12 August 2026 in Pallasovsky District, Russia, and satellites saw it burning for 1 day. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 7,913 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 150 in Russia in 2026, of 420.

GWIS near-real-time perimeter, from the layer that changed in October 2025: this fire is not compared with fires from earlier years, because since then the GWIS layer gives more and larger perimeters.

Burnt area
7,913ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
1day
12 Aug 2026 – 12 Aug 2026
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
12 Aug
2026
Heat detections
123
in a single hotspot: 97 MW
Danger at start
43
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
3.0GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 12 Aug12 Aug

How it evolved, day by day

12 Aug 2026 · 2,991 MW · 123

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
29km/h · peak gust
20%lowest humidity

It had gone 15 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

21% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,100 ha in 2017, 221 ha in 2019, 336 ha in 2020.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 5% of the area of London (79 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. Pallasovsky District where it started
    7,858 ha reached on 12 Aug
    0.6 %

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)
12 Aug 33.3 °C 20 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
13 Aug after 26.0 °C 28 % 42 km/h 0.6 mm Extreme 51
14 Aug after 23.1 °C 26 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
15 Aug after 24.9 °C 19 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
16 Aug after 27.5 °C 24 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
17 Aug after 32.2 °C 21 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
18 Aug after 33.6 °C 13 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
19 Aug after 33.9 °C 13 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
20 Aug after 33.2 °C 18 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
21 Aug after 32.1 °C 20 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
22 Aug after 37.0 °C 16 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 75

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 5 Aug 2026
After · 19 Aug 2026

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 12 August 2026 the air beside the fire reached 32 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 15: 1.0 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak32 µg/m³
Days over the guideline1 day
PM1033 µg/m³
Optical depth0.74
10 Aug12 Aug14 Aug
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 · 123Every 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 Russia

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Pallasovsky District fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 12 August 2026 and 12 August 2026: 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 7,913 hectares (79.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Pallasovsky District (7,858 ha, 0.6 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 33.3 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 29 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 43, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Russia (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: 112 · 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.

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 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. 123 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 (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.