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Seredyna-Buda fire, 10 September 2024 Середино-Будський район · Seredyna-Buda

Out · last detection 25 Sept 2024, 11:50 UTC

The fire started on 10 September 2024 in Seredyna-Buda, Ukraine, and satellites saw it burning for 16 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 2,352 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 4th largest in Sumy Oblast since 2016 (of 129 with a page). Number 30 in Ukraine in 2024, of 2092.

Compare with…
Burnt area
2,352ha
Copernicus perimeter
Duration
16days
10 Sept 2024 – 25 Sept 2024
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
10 Sept
2024
Heat detections
359
in a single hotspot: 114 MW
Danger at start
40
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
139MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 10 Sept25 Sept
25 Sept 2024

How it evolved, day by day

13 Sept 2024 · 2 MW · 1 14 Sept 2024 · 74 MW · 10 15 Sept 2024 · 30 MW · 16 16 Sept 2024 · 405 MW · 23 17 Sept 2024 · 12 MW · 3 18 Sept 2024 · 4 MW · 4 19 Sept 2024 · 54 MW · 16 20 Sept 2024 · 81 MW · 33 21 Sept 2024 · 36 MW · 19 22 Sept 2024 · 15 MW · 11 23 Sept 2024 · 52 MW · 22 24 Sept 2024 · 561 MW · 74 25 Sept 2024 · 475 MW · 127
13 Sept 15 Sept 17 Sept 19 Sept 21 Sept 23 Sept 24 Sept 25 Sept

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

The weather it burned in

27°high
52km/h · peak gust
23%lowest humidity

It had gone 2 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 3.6 mm on 4 Oct.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1.5% of the area of London (24 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. Seredyna-Buda Середино-Будський район 15,686 inhabitants · 9.3 km from the centre where it started
    2,268 ha reached on 15 Sept
    2.0 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the official 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.

What burned

  • Coniferous forest50 %
  • Broadleaved forest34 %
  • Mixed forest15 %
  • Other natural land0.6 %

Land cover inside the perimeter as reported by Copernicus EFFIS (outside the Corine Land Cover area).

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) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
15 Sept 26.6 °C 23 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
16 Sept 25.9 °C 33 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
17 Sept 24.8 °C 31 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
18 Sept 21.8 °C 33 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
19 Sept 22.7 °C 33 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
20 Sept 21.1 °C 49 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
21 Sept 22.6 °C 45 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
22 Sept 20.0 °C 43 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
23 Sept 20.3 °C 43 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
24 Sept 23.1 °C 35 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
25 Sept 25.0 °C 34 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
26 Sept after 19.4 °C 39 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
27 Sept after 23.1 °C 52 % 52 km/h 3.5 mm Low 10
28 Sept after 26.4 °C 40 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
29 Sept after 22.5 °C 43 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
30 Sept after 16.9 °C 51 % 44 km/h 0.7 mm Moderate 19
1 Oct after 21.8 °C 30 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
2 Oct after 22.0 °C 26 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
3 Oct after 21.8 °C 27 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
4 Oct after 17.9 °C 43 % 31 km/h 3.6 mm Low 6

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 3 Sept 2024
After · 2 Oct 2024

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 29 September 2024 the air beside the fire reached 32 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 16: 1.1 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak32 µg/m³
Days over the guideline2 days
PM1056 µg/m³
Optical depth0.30
13141516171819202122232425262728293012
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 · 359Every 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 Ukraine ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Seredyna-Buda fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 10 September 2024 to 25 September 2024 (16 days). The perimeter dates it from 16 September 2024 to 20 September 2024.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 2,352 hectares (23.5 km²). Official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Seredyna-Buda (2,268 ha, 2.0 %).
Did the fire reach a town?
The fire started in Seredyna-Buda and came within 9.3 km of its centre. That is the distance from the perimeter, or the nearest hotspot, to the point marking the centre; it does not mean it entered the houses.
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 26.6 °C, humidity dropped to 23 % and gusts hit 52 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 40, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Ukraine (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.

Emergency number: 101 · 112 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

Satellite cross-check

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

No changes since 24 October 2026.

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.

Report an error
What do you think is wrong?

We will only use your email to reply about this report. Privacy. This is not an emergency service: if there is a fire now, call 101 · 112.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
  • Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 16 September 2024 to 20 September 2024. 359 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 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 and land cover come from the Copernicus European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), measured on MODIS and Sentinel-2 imagery and published under CC BY 4.0. 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 (Public Domain). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ slightly from each country’s official figure.