Skip to content
worldfires
SS · South Sudan · –

Raga fire, 1 November 2026 Raga

Dying down · last detection 13 Nov 2026, 23:43 UTC

The fire started on 1 November 2026 in Raga, South Sudan, and satellites saw it burning for 13 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 15,097 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 32 in South Sudan in 2026, of 246.

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.

Compare with…

Is it still active?

No detections since 13 Nov 2026, 23:43 UTC. That usually means no flame is visible from space any more, although hotspots may remain. 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
15,097ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
13days
1 Nov 2026 – 13 Nov 2026
Municipalities hit
1
counties
Started on
1 Nov
2026
Heat detections
450
in a single hotspot: 149 MW
Danger at start
55
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
277MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Nov13 Nov
13 Nov 2026

How it evolved, day by day

1 Nov 2026 · 34 MW · 7 2 Nov 2026 · 16 MW · 6 3 Nov 2026 · 34 MW · 5 4 Nov 2026 · 30 MW · 7 5 Nov 2026 · 46 MW · 9 6 Nov 2026 · 14 MW · 3 7 Nov 2026 · 678 MW · 27 8 Nov 2026 · 181 MW · 19 9 Nov 2026 · 531 MW · 71 10 Nov 2026 · 1,220 MW · 197 11 Nov 2026 · 521 MW · 63 12 Nov 2026 · 212 MW · 29 13 Nov 2026 · 86 MW · 7
1 Nov 4 Nov 7 Nov 10 Nov 13 Nov

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

Fire front film How it spread from one satellite pass to the next (45 passes) and with what wind. Watch the film

The weather it burned in

39°high
44km/h · peak gust
8%lowest humidity

It had gone 13 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

35% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,965 ha in 2016, 583 ha in 2019, 818 ha in 2020, 332 ha in 2021, 264 ha in 2022, 343 ha in 2023, 3,639 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 5,325 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 9.5% of the area of London (151 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. Raga where it started
    15,215 ha reached on 1 Nov
    0.2 %

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 2025
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2025, 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. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.

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) · forecast models, provisional until the ERA5 reanalysis arrives

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
1 Nov 37.8 °C 17 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
2 Nov 38.1 °C 17 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
3 Nov 39.1 °C 13 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
4 Nov 39.4 °C 12 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
5 Nov 38.7 °C 12 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 70
6 Nov 38.5 °C 12 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 67
7 Nov 37.2 °C 11 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 70
8 Nov 36.1 °C 13 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 72
9 Nov 35.8 °C 13 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 70
10 Nov 34.0 °C 8 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 73
11 Nov 33.9 °C 10 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 66
12 Nov 34.7 °C 10 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
13 Nov 35.6 °C 10 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
14 Nov after 36.6 °C 9 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 73

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 25 Oct 2026
After · 13 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 2 November 2026 the air beside the fire reached 123 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 71: 4.7 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak123 µg/m³
Days over the guideline12 days
PM10152 µg/m³
Optical depth0.88
30 Oct2 Nov5 Nov8 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 · 450Every 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 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 1 November 2026 to 13 November 2026 (13 days). The perimeter dates it from 8 November 2026 to 13 November 2026.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 15,097 hectares (151.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Raga (15,215 ha, 0.2 %).
Is the Raga fire still active?
No fire detections since 13 Nov 2026, 23:43 UTC. A lack of detections is not an official extinction.
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 39.4 °C, humidity dropped to 8 % and gusts hit 44 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 73, class Very 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

History of this page · 2 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 11 November 2026.
  1. Area: 6,568 → 15,097 ha.
  2. Page published (6,568 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.

Report an error
What do you think is wrong?

We will only use your email to reply about this report. Privacy.

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 8 November 2026 to 13 November 2026. 450 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.
  • Built-up area and population come from the JRC Global Human Settlement Layer (epoch 2025, 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.