Popasna fire, October 2020 Попаснянський район · Novoaidar, Popasna
The fire started on 1 October 2020 in Popasna, Ukraine, and satellites saw it burning for 7 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 4,293 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 2 municipalities.
It is the 9th largest in Luhansk Oblast since 2016 (of 909 with a page). Number 11 in Ukraine in 2020, of 132.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 4,293ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- 7days
- 1 Oct 2020 – 7 Oct 2020
- Municipalities hit
- 2
- districts
- Started on
- 1 Oct
- 2020
- Heat detections
- 167
- in a single hotspot: 32 MW
- Danger at start
- 53
- Extreme · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 221MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
It had gone 39 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.4 mm on 11 Oct.
This area had burned before
No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Kyiv boundary: geoBoundaries · OpenStreetMap, Wambacher · © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 1.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
2,714 ha reached on 2 Oct1.6 %
-
1,584 ha reached on 2 Oct0.8 %
Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the official 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.
What burned
- Coniferous forest77 %
- Mixed forest23 %
Land cover inside the perimeter as reported by Copernicus EFFIS (outside the Corine Land Cover area).
People and buildings inside the perimeter
GHSL 2020Inside the perimeter there were about 0.42 hectares of built-up land and about 20 residents (GHSL 2020, 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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Oct | 21.6 °C | 20 % | 63 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 53 |
| 2 Oct | 19.5 °C | 33 % | 55 km/h | 2.5 mm | Moderate 15 |
| 3 Oct | 20.1 °C | 31 % | 42 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 23 |
| 4 Oct | 21.9 °C | 17 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 36 |
| 5 Oct | 22.7 °C | 17 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 40 |
| 6 Oct | 22.8 °C | 19 % | 43 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 41 |
| 7 Oct | 22.8 °C | 21 % | 52 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 46 |
| 8 Oct after | 21.9 °C | 20 % | 47 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 45 |
| 9 Oct after | 22.6 °C | 21 % | 52 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 48 |
| 10 Oct after | 19.2 °C | 35 % | 46 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 37 |
| 11 Oct after | 18.2 °C | 56 % | 45 km/h | 1.4 mm | Moderate 13 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
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 · 167Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 7,135 haNovoaidar Новоайдарський район6 July 2020 · 5 days · 9 km away
- 3,400 haNovoaidar Новоайдарський район26 March 2024 · 10 days · 13 km away
- 12,789 haNovoaidar Новоайдарський районSeptember 2020 · 5 days · 16 km away
- 2,613 haNovoaidar Новоайдарський районApril 2025 · 7 days · 17 km away
- 3,888 haSlovianoserbsk Слов'яносербський районMay 2024 · 7 days · 25 km away
- 4,004 haSlovianoserbsk Слов'яносербський район27 July 2025 · 5 days · 36 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Popasna fire last?
- Copernicus dates it between 1 October 2020 and 7 October 2020: 7 days between the first and last image with fire.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 4,293 hectares (42.9 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 2 municipalities: Novoaidar (2,714 ha, 1.6 %); Popasna (1,584 ha, 0.8 %).
- Did the fire reach a town?
- The fire came within 23.3 km of the centre of Novoaidar, the closest of the areas it touched. That is the distance from the perimeter, or the nearest hotspot, to the point marking the centre; it does not mean it entered the houses.
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 22.8 °C, humidity dropped to 17 % and gusts hit 63 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 53, class Extreme.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Ukraine (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: 101 · 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.
No changes 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
How we know this
- Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
- Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 167 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 2020, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.
Where this data comes from
The perimeter and land cover come from the Copernicus European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), measured on MODIS and Sentinel-2 imagery and published under CC BY 4.0. 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 (Public Domain). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ slightly from each country’s official figure.