How long did the Raga fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 27 November 2017 to 13 December 2017 (17 days). The perimeter dates it from 27 November 2017 to 6 December 2017.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 19,066 hectares (190.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Raga (17,868 ha, 0.3 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 35.2 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 42 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 48, class Very high.

Where does this data come from?

From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of South Sudan (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

SS · South Sudan · 2017-11-27 → 2017-12-13

Raga fire, 27 November 2017 Raga

Out · last detection 13 Dec 2017, 11:00 UTC

The fire started on 27 November 2017 in Raga, South Sudan, and satellites saw it burning for 17 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 19,066 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 64th largest in Western Bahr el Ghazal since 2016 (of 430 with a page). Number 20 in South Sudan in 2017, of 203.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Raga · 2024 Djema · 2020 Raga · 2018 Djema · 2025

Burnt area: 19,066ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 17days; 27 Nov 2017 – 13 Dec 2017
Municipalities hit: 1; counties
Started on: 27 Nov; 2017
Heat detections: 591; in a single hotspot: 110 MW
Danger at start: 35; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 452MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 27 Nov13 Dec

Play back 13 Dec 2017

How it evolved, day by day

27 Nov 30 Nov 3 Dec 6 Dec 10 Dec 13 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

35°high

42km/h · peak gust

14%lowest humidity

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

This area had burned before

46% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 9,112 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 12% of the area of London (191 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

Raga where it started

17,868 ha reached on 27 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.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2015

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2015, 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	Danger (FWI)
27 Nov	31.8 °C	18 %	35 km/h	High 35
28 Nov	32.5 °C	18 %	34 km/h	High 35
29 Nov	33.0 °C	22 %	33 km/h	High 35
30 Nov	33.6 °C	21 %	36 km/h	High 37
1 Dec	33.1 °C	16 %	38 km/h	Very high 40
2 Dec	32.4 °C	15 %	26 km/h	High 36
3 Dec	33.5 °C	16 %	34 km/h	Very high 39
4 Dec	34.0 °C	17 %	36 km/h	Very high 40
5 Dec	34.2 °C	18 %	36 km/h	Very high 41
6 Dec	34.4 °C	18 %	34 km/h	Very high 40
7 Dec	33.2 °C	19 %	42 km/h	Very high 45
8 Dec	32.4 °C	19 %	40 km/h	Very high 46
9 Dec	32.4 °C	20 %	38 km/h	Very high 45
10 Dec	34.1 °C	17 %	34 km/h	Very high 42
11 Dec	35.0 °C	16 %	37 km/h	Very high 44
12 Dec	35.2 °C	14 %	42 km/h	Very high 48
13 Dec	34.5 °C	14 %	37 km/h	Very high 46
14 Dec after	34.1 °C	16 %	40 km/h	Very high 48
15 Dec after	33.4 °C	15 %	36 km/h	Very high 46
16 Dec after	33.3 °C	16 %	37 km/h	Very high 47
17 Dec after	33.3 °C	16 %	35 km/h	Very high 47
18 Dec after	34.1 °C	16 %	36 km/h	Very high 48
19 Dec after	34.8 °C	15 %	35 km/h	Very high 47
20 Dec after	35.4 °C	15 %	40 km/h	Extreme 51
21 Dec after	36.3 °C	15 %	40 km/h	Extreme 50
22 Dec after	35.9 °C	13 %	36 km/h	Very high 49
23 Dec after	36.1 °C	11 %	41 km/h	Extreme 54

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 20 Nov 2017

After · 20 Dec 2017

Before After

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 · 591Every 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 time	Satellite	FRP (MW)	Lat	Lon

Other fires nearby

All fires in South Sudan ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Raga fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 27 November 2017 to 13 December 2017 (17 days). The perimeter dates it from 27 November 2017 to 6 December 2017.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 19,066 hectares (190.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Raga (17,868 ha, 0.3 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 35.2 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 42 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 48, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of South Sudan (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

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

26 October 2026 Last day with fire: 6 December 2017 → 13 December 2017.

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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What do you think is wrong?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

What really happened?

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How we know this

Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 27 November 2017 to 6 December 2017. 591 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 2015, 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 (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.

Where it burned