Rumphi fire, 14 October 2026 Karonga, Rumphi
Satellites first detected fire on 14 October 2026 in Rumphi, Malawi. It has been active for 10 days, with 89 heat detections and an area with fire of about 1,120 hectares rebuilt from them, spread across 2 municipalities.
GWIS (Copernicus) has not yet published the perimeter of this fire. It rebuilds it from hotspots, which can take several days, and it does not always arrive. For now the area is the one rebuilt from heat detections (about 14 hectares per pixel). If the perimeter arrives, this page picks it up on its own and keeps the same address.
Is it still active?
Satellites detected fire on 23 Oct 2026, 23:41 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.
- Area with fire
- ≈ 1,120ha
- rebuilt from hotspots, no official perimeter yet
- Duration
- 10days
- 14 Oct 2026 – 23 Oct 2026
- Municipalities hit
- 2
- districts
- Started on
- 14 Oct
- 2026
- Heat detections
- 89
- in a single hotspot: 31 MW
- Energy released
- 584MW
- sum of detected power
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
What happened to each town
-
1,078 ha reached on 14 Oct0.3 %
-
Rumphi where it started42 ha reached on 14 Oct0.0 %
Area with fire inside each municipality, rebuilt from heat detections (about 14 hectares per VIIRS pixel). An estimate until the official perimeter arrives. The distance is from the town centre to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
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 · 89Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Rumphi fire last?
- According to the heat detections seen by satellite, it burned from 14 October 2026 to 23 October 2026 (10 days between the first and the last detection). There is no perimeter yet to date it.
- How much area did it burn?
- There is no perimeter yet. Heat detections rebuild about 1,120 hectares with fire (11.2 km²), a rough figure; GWIS will give its own when it publishes the perimeter, which can take several days.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 2 municipalities: Karonga (1,078 ha, 0.3 %); Rumphi (42 ha, 0.0 %).
- Is the Rumphi fire still active?
- Yes: satellites detected fire on 23 Oct 2026, 23:41 UTC. Check the emergency service for the official status.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Malawi (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
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
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.