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SS · South Sudan · –

Raga fire, 25 October 2026 Raga

Dying down · last detection 14 Nov 2026, 12:27 UTC

The fire started on 25 October 2026 in Raga, South Sudan, and satellites saw it burning for 21 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 45,294 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 7 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 14 Nov 2026, 12:27 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
45,294ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
21days
25 Oct 2026 – 14 Nov 2026
Municipalities hit
1
counties
Started on
25 Oct
2026
Heat detections
1,775
in a single hotspot: 277 MW
Danger at start
53
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
954MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 25 Oct14 Nov
14 Nov 2026

How it evolved, day by day

25 Oct 2026 · 10 MW · 1 26 Oct 2026 · 52 MW · 7 27 Oct 2026 · 73 MW · 6 28 Oct 2026 · 24 MW · 6 29 Oct 2026 · 0 MW · 0 30 Oct 2026 · 0 MW · 0 31 Oct 2026 · 71 MW · 13 1 Nov 2026 · 16 MW · 3 2 Nov 2026 · 254 MW · 34 3 Nov 2026 · 550 MW · 43 4 Nov 2026 · 613 MW · 39 5 Nov 2026 · 4,946 MW · 223 6 Nov 2026 · 4,180 MW · 317 7 Nov 2026 · 48 MW · 8 8 Nov 2026 · 82 MW · 12 9 Nov 2026 · 601 MW · 73 10 Nov 2026 · 2,972 MW · 468 11 Nov 2026 · 1,340 MW · 259 12 Nov 2026 · 1,496 MW · 151 13 Nov 2026 · 599 MW · 75 14 Nov 2026 · 204 MW · 37
25 Oct 30 Oct 5 Nov 9 Nov 14 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 (69 passes) and with what wind. Watch the film

The weather it burned in

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

It had gone 14 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

93% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 7,955 ha in 2016, 8,032 ha in 2017, 867 ha in 2018, 8,115 ha in 2019, 8,051 ha in 2020, 11,864 ha in 2021, 5,899 ha in 2022, 4,393 ha in 2023, 8,554 ha in 2024, 30,735 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 42,076 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 29% of the area of London (453 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
    45,638 ha reached on 25 Oct
    0.7 %

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

Started with Very dry air: 33 % of the area in South Sudan

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
25 Oct 39.6 °C 13 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
26 Oct 38.5 °C 18 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
27 Oct 38.3 °C 21 % 34 km/h 19.0 mm Very high 48
28 Oct 38.0 °C 20 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
29 Oct 37.7 °C 11 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
30 Oct 38.3 °C 12 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
31 Oct 38.3 °C 15 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
1 Nov 38.0 °C 17 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
2 Nov 38.5 °C 19 % 32 km/h 0.1 mm Very high 46
3 Nov 39.6 °C 13 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
4 Nov 40.2 °C 12 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
5 Nov 39.4 °C 12 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
6 Nov 39.2 °C 12 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 68
7 Nov 38.0 °C 11 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 66
8 Nov 36.8 °C 13 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 73
9 Nov 36.3 °C 14 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 68
10 Nov 34.5 °C 8 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 71
11 Nov 34.4 °C 11 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 64
12 Nov 35.2 °C 11 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
13 Nov 35.9 °C 9 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
14 Nov 36.8 °C 9 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 70

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 18 Oct 2026
After · 14 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 6 November 2026 the air beside the fire reached 79 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 54: 3.6 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak79 µg/m³
Days over the guideline12 days
PM10162 µg/m³
Optical depth0.75
31 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 · 1,775Every 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 25 October 2026 to 14 November 2026 (21 days). The perimeter dates it from 30 October 2026 to 13 November 2026.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 45,294 hectares (452.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Raga (45,638 ha, 0.7 %).
Is the Raga fire still active?
No fire detections since 14 Nov 2026, 12:27 UTC. A lack of detections is not an official extinction.
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 40.2 °C, humidity dropped to 8 % and gusts hit 40 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 · 4 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 12 November 2026.
  1. Mapped perimeter arrives: from ≈ 5,054 ha estimated from hotspots to 45,294 ha.
  2. Start date: 2 November 2026 → 24 October 2026.
  3. The page “Raga, 27 October 2026” has been merged into this one: it was the same fire.
  4. Page published (≈ 5,054 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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 30 October 2026 to 13 November 2026. 1,775 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 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.