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Quara fire, 1 December 2019 Quara

Out · last detection 23 Dec 2019, 11:25 UTC

The fire started on 1 December 2019 in Quara, Ethiopia, and satellites saw it burning for 22 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 23,857 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 4th largest in Amhara since 2016 (of 172 with a page). Number 2 in Ethiopia in 2019, of 220.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Quara · 2025Quara · 2024Quara · 2016Quara · 2021

Burnt area
23,857ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
22days
1 Dec 2019 – 22 Dec 2019
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
1 Dec
2019
Heat detections
700
in a single hotspot: 0 MW
Danger at start
32
High · FWI index
Average daily power
259MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Dec22 Dec
23 Dec 2019

How it evolved, day by day

1 Dec 2019 · 41 MW · 4 3 Dec 2019 · 80 MW · 14 4 Dec 2019 · 92 MW · 22 5 Dec 2019 · 440 MW · 56 6 Dec 2019 · 1,700 MW · 122 7 Dec 2019 · 673 MW · 78 8 Dec 2019 · 248 MW · 39 9 Dec 2019 · 78 MW · 19 10 Dec 2019 · 308 MW · 23 11 Dec 2019 · 12 MW · 2 13 Dec 2019 · 35 MW · 5 14 Dec 2019 · 487 MW · 52 15 Dec 2019 · 272 MW · 73 16 Dec 2019 · 183 MW · 56 17 Dec 2019 · 16 MW · 13 18 Dec 2019 · 154 MW · 27 19 Dec 2019 · 362 MW · 35 20 Dec 2019 · 74 MW · 21 21 Dec 2019 · 124 MW · 19 22 Dec 2019 · 49 MW · 17 23 Dec 2019 · 10 MW · 3
1 Dec 5 Dec 6 Dec 8 Dec 11 Dec 15 Dec 18 Dec 21 Dec

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

The weather it burned in

37°high
33km/h · peak gust
19%lowest humidity

It had gone 22 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

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 15% of the area of London (239 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. Quara where it started
    23,799 ha
    2.8 %

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 2020
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (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 Dec 36.4 °C 22 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
2 Dec 36.7 °C 19 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
3 Dec 35.9 °C 19 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
4 Dec 35.7 °C 20 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
5 Dec 36.1 °C 21 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
6 Dec 36.9 °C 23 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
7 Dec 35.7 °C 23 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
8 Dec 35.8 °C 27 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
9 Dec 36.6 °C 27 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
10 Dec 37.0 °C 23 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
11 Dec 37.3 °C 20 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
12 Dec 34.4 °C 35 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
13 Dec 36.1 °C 30 % 17 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
14 Dec 36.4 °C 25 % 20 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
15 Dec 37.0 °C 27 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
16 Dec 35.0 °C 30 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
17 Dec 35.1 °C 31 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
18 Dec 35.6 °C 31 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
19 Dec 36.4 °C 25 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
20 Dec 35.9 °C 28 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
21 Dec 35.9 °C 25 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
22 Dec 36.2 °C 21 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
23 Dec after 36.2 °C 19 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
24 Dec after 36.7 °C 15 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
25 Dec after 35.6 °C 13 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
26 Dec after 35.0 °C 17 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
27 Dec after 34.5 °C 22 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
28 Dec after 33.4 °C 20 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
29 Dec after 34.2 °C 17 % 19 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
30 Dec after 36.4 °C 16 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
31 Dec after 37.0 °C 20 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
1 Jan after 36.8 °C 22 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 24 Nov 2019
After · 29 Dec 2019

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 Ethiopia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Quara fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 1 December 2019 and 22 December 2019: 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 23,857 hectares (238.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Quara (23,799 ha, 2.8 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 37.3 °C, humidity dropped to 19 % and gusts hit 33 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 Ethiopia (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 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.

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How we know this
  • Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery; 4 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 2020, 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.