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ET · Ethiopia · –

Quara fire, 30 October 2026 Quara

Burning · last detection 10 Nov 2026, 22:58 UTC

The fire started on 30 October 2026 in Quara, Ethiopia, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,703 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 119 in Ethiopia in 2026, of 204.

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

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Is it still active?

Satellites detected fire on 10 Nov 2026, 22:58 UTC. Everything suggests it is still burning. Satellites pass a few times a day and cloud or smoke can hide the fire: a lack of detections is not an official extinction. Each country’s emergency service declares a fire contained or out.

Burnt area
2,703ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
12days
30 Oct 2026 – 10 Nov 2026
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
30 Oct
2026
Heat detections
54
in a single hotspot: 43 MW
Danger at start
63
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
51MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 30 Oct10 Nov
10 Nov 2026

How it evolved, day by day

1 Nov 2026 · 13 MW · 3 2 Nov 2026 · 0 MW · 0 5 Nov 2026 · 14 MW · 1 6 Nov 2026 · 50 MW · 12 7 Nov 2026 · 151 MW · 19 8 Nov 2026 · 16 MW · 4 9 Nov 2026 · 62 MW · 15 10 Nov 2026 · 0 MW · 0
1 Nov 5 Nov 7 Nov 9 Nov

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

The weather it burned in

40°high
41km/h · peak gust
8%lowest humidity

It had gone 18 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

100% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,814 ha in 2016, 197 ha in 2017, 103 ha in 2018, 1,892 ha in 2019, 2,191 ha in 2020, 1,392 ha in 2021, 1,805 ha in 2022, 194 ha in 2023, 610 ha in 2024, 873 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 2,720 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1.7% of the area of London (27 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
    2,719 ha reached on 1 Nov
    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.

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) · forecast models, provisional until the ERA5 reanalysis arrives

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
30 Oct 39.0 °C 20 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
31 Oct 38.8 °C 19 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
1 Nov 39.3 °C 18 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
2 Nov 39.7 °C 14 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
3 Nov 40.3 °C 13 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 67
4 Nov 39.7 °C 8 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
5 Nov 39.4 °C 12 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
6 Nov 39.2 °C 13 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
7 Nov 39.2 °C 14 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 74
8 Nov 38.1 °C 16 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 70
9 Nov 37.1 °C 18 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
10 Nov 36.5 °C 17 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 23 Oct 2026
After · 10 Nov 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 1 November 2026 the air beside the fire reached 46 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 31: 2.0 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak46 µg/m³
Days over the guideline9 days
PM1084 µg/m³
Optical depth0.41
28 Oct31 Oct3 Nov6 Nov9 Nov
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 · 54Every 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?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 30 October 2026 to 10 November 2026 (12 days). The perimeter dates it from 6 November 2026 to 9 November 2026.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 2,703 hectares (27.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Quara (2,719 ha, 0.3 %).
Is the Quara fire still active?
Yes: satellites detected fire on 10 Nov 2026, 22:58 UTC. Check the emergency service for the official status.
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 40.3 °C, humidity dropped to 8 % and gusts hit 41 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 74, class Very extreme.
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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 10 November 2026.
  1. Page published (2,703 ha).

RSS Changes to this page With cross-checks and a citable version

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.
  • Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 6 November 2026 to 9 November 2026. 54 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.
  • Weather: ECMWF IFS model, provisional until the ERA5 reanalysis arrives.

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.