How long did the Raga fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 19 December 2019 to 10 January 2020 (23 days). The perimeter dates it from 20 December 2019 to 3 January 2020.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 27,769 hectares (277.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Raga (27,732 ha, 0.4 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 36.0 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 40 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 54, class Extreme.

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 · 2019-12-19 → 2020-01-10

Raga fire, 19 December 2019 Raga

Out · last detection 11 Jan 2020, 12:08 UTC

The fire started on 19 December 2019 in Raga, South Sudan, and satellites saw it burning for 23 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 27,769 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 42th largest in Western Bahr el Ghazal since 2016 (of 434 with a page). Number 17 in South Sudan in 2019, of 150.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Raga · 2016 Raga · 2018 Raga · 2018 Raga · 2025

Burnt area: 27,769ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 23days; 19 Dec 2019 – 10 Jan 2020
Municipalities hit: 1; counties
Started on: 19 Dec; 2019
Heat detections: 1,113; in a single hotspot: 65 MW
Danger at start: 43; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 264MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 19 Dec10 Jan

Play back 11 Jan 2020

How it evolved, day by day

19 Dec 23 Dec 27 Dec 31 Dec 4 Jan 8 Jan

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

The weather it burned in

36°high

40km/h · peak gust

9%lowest humidity

It had gone 39 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

92% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 23,734 ha in 2016, 3,249 ha in 2017, 14,684 ha in 2018. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 25,577 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 18% of the area of London (278 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

27,732 ha reached on 19 Dec

0.4 %

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	Danger (FWI)
19 Dec	33.2 °C	18 %	36 km/h	Very high 43
20 Dec	32.8 °C	18 %	31 km/h	Very high 41
21 Dec	34.3 °C	19 %	36 km/h	Very high 43
22 Dec	34.4 °C	19 %	37 km/h	Very high 44
23 Dec	35.2 °C	16 %	36 km/h	Very high 44
24 Dec	34.9 °C	19 %	35 km/h	Very high 45
25 Dec	35.2 °C	18 %	35 km/h	Very high 45
26 Dec	33.8 °C	12 %	40 km/h	Very high 50
27 Dec	33.2 °C	11 %	36 km/h	Very high 48
28 Dec	32.6 °C	9 %	36 km/h	Very high 50
29 Dec	33.9 °C	10 %	35 km/h	Very high 50
30 Dec	34.9 °C	11 %	35 km/h	Extreme 50
31 Dec	34.8 °C	12 %	39 km/h	Extreme 53
1 Jan	35.1 °C	15 %	35 km/h	Very high 50
2 Jan	36.0 °C	18 %	34 km/h	Very high 50
3 Jan	35.0 °C	19 %	39 km/h	Very high 50
4 Jan	32.7 °C	16 %	35 km/h	Extreme 51
5 Jan	31.6 °C	17 %	37 km/h	Extreme 51
6 Jan	33.0 °C	15 %	33 km/h	Very high 48
7 Jan	33.5 °C	15 %	38 km/h	Extreme 51
8 Jan	34.5 °C	14 %	38 km/h	Extreme 52
9 Jan	33.0 °C	13 %	40 km/h	Extreme 54
10 Jan	33.5 °C	13 %	36 km/h	Extreme 52
11 Jan after	32.3 °C	10 %	35 km/h	Extreme 52
12 Jan after	31.0 °C	9 %	37 km/h	Extreme 53
13 Jan after	32.5 °C	9 %	33 km/h	Very high 50
14 Jan after	34.8 °C	12 %	35 km/h	Extreme 51
15 Jan after	36.6 °C	11 %	34 km/h	Extreme 51
16 Jan after	37.0 °C	11 %	39 km/h	Extreme 54
17 Jan after	37.0 °C	12 %	38 km/h	Extreme 54
18 Jan after	34.3 °C	13 %	35 km/h	Extreme 57
19 Jan after	32.6 °C	14 %	39 km/h	Extreme 57
20 Jan after	32.1 °C	14 %	40 km/h	Extreme 56

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 12 Dec 2019

After · 17 Jan 2020

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 · 1,113Every 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 19 December 2019 to 10 January 2020 (23 days). The perimeter dates it from 20 December 2019 to 3 January 2020.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 27,769 hectares (277.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Raga (27,732 ha, 0.4 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 36.0 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 40 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 54, class Extreme.
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 · 2 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

26 October 2026 Last day with fire: 3 January 2020 → 10 January 2020.
26 October 2026 Start date: 20 December 2019 → 19 December 2019.

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 20 December 2019 to 3 January 2020. 1,113 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 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