Burned area
satellite only10,570ha
Perimeter published by GWIS (Copernicus).
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus)
- Date
- 25 Jul 2016 – 29 Jul 2016
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page to compare it with.
TZ · Tanzania · –
Serengeti fire, 25 July 2016 Serengeti
Out · last detection 29 Jul 2016, 11:10 UTC
The fire started on 25 July 2016 in Serengeti, Tanzania, and satellites saw it burning for 5 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 10,570 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 5th largest in Mara since 2016 (of 63 with a page). Number 17 in Tanzania in 2016, of 160.
Use this data
Compare with…
Use this data
Fire page data · version 2026-10-27matches the official recordwith caveatssatellite onlymodel
When copying, the sentence is
Tick the figures you want: they make up the lede and the CSV.
Duration by satellite
satellite only5days
25 Jul 2016 to 29 Jul 2016: first and last day with fire on the page.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- last detection: 29 Jul 2016, 11:10 UTC
+− cross-check
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.
Start
satellite only25 Jul 2016
First day with fire seen by the satellites or the perimeter.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- 25 Jul 2016
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page, so the alert time and the cause are not known here.
Hotspots
satellite only327
VIIRS detections at 375 m. Most intense hotspot: 90 MW.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (Suomi NPP)
- Date
- 25 Jul 2016 – 29 Jul 2016
+− cross-check
There is no official record to compare with. Each hotspot is a pixel detected in one satellite pass, not a separate fire.
The worst day
satellite only1,418MW
Total radiative power on 27 July 2016; hotspots that day: 141.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (FRP)
- Date
- 27 Jul 2016
+− cross-check
Fire radiative power (FRP) measures the energy the fire gives off when the satellite passes. Added up by day, it compares intensity, not area.
Danger at the start
model39.0FWI · very high
Fire Weather Index (Canadian system) computed by WorldFires for the day the fire started. Consecutive days without rain before: 32.
- Source
- WorldFires calculation (Canadian FWI system)
- Date
- 25 Jul 2016, local noon
- Model
- ERA5 0,25° (ECMWF · Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com
+− cross-check
This is an index computed from weather model data, not a measurement of the fire nor an official warning. Danger warnings are issued by each country’s authority. Emergency number and official warnings
Weather during the fire
model32.2°C · 19% RH
High of 32.2 °C and minimum humidity of 19% on 27 July 2016; gusts of 40 km/h on 25 July 2016.
- Source
- weather model at the fire’s grid cell
- Date
- 25 Jul 2016 – 29 Jul 2016
- Model
- ERA5 0,25° (ECMWF · Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com
+− cross-check
These are model values for a cell of about 25 km, not from a weather station: they may differ from what was measured on the ground.
This page’s change log has been kept since 24 October 2026: every night what it publishes is compared and the difference is logged. Anything earlier is reconstructed from each source’s date and marked as reconstructed.
Show
-
logLast day with fire: 28 July 2016 → 29 July 2016.
-
· reconstructed weatherWeather and FWI computed from the ERA5 reanalysis
-
· reconstructed GHSLPopulation and built-up area computed
What was saved on 27 October 2026
Every night a snapshot of what the page shows is saved. If anything changes, it appears in the list as a log entry.
- Area
- 10,570 ha
- Dates
- 25 Jul 2016 – 29 Jul 2016
- Name
- Serengeti
- Official record
- —
Versioned permanent link
https://worldfires.org/en/fire/serengeti-2016-07-6?v=2026-10-27A version keeps the area, dates, name and official record; the area as it was logged (changes under 2% are not logged). The map, hotspots and weather always show today’s data.
Citation
A lede of about 60 words figures only, no adjectives
CSV for this fire serengeti-2016-07-6.csv · daily, no individual hotspots
| fecha | focos_viirs | frp_mw | tmax_c | tmin_c | hr_min_pct | viento_max_kmh | racha_max_kmh | precip_mm | fwi | clase_fwi | dentro_del_incendio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-07-25 | 93 | 333 | 30.5 | 18 | 20 | 17.7 | 40 | 0 | 39 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2016-07-26 | 85 | 541 | 30.7 | 17.4 | 19 | 17.8 | 39.2 | 0 | 40.4 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2016-07-27 | 141 | 1,418 | 32.2 | 14.3 | 19 | 9.7 | 27 | 0 | 34.2 | alto | 1 |
| 2016-07-28 | 6 | 132 | 28.5 | 16.7 | 26 | 13.1 | 29.9 | 0.1 | 36.1 | alto | 1 |
| 2016-07-29 | 2 | 26 | 30.5 | 15.9 | 22 | 13.3 | 33.1 | 0 | 36.7 | alto | 1 |
| 2016-07-30 | 0 | 0 | 30.9 | 16 | 19 | 12 | 28.8 | 0 | 36.2 | alto | 0 |
| 2016-07-31 | 0 | 0 | 30.1 | 16.3 | 24 | 8.3 | 25.2 | 0 | 33.4 | alto | 0 |
| 2016-08-01 | 0 | 0 | 32 | 15.3 | 20 | 10.4 | 27.4 | 0 | 35.5 | alto | 0 |
| 2016-08-02 | 0 | 0 | 31.5 | 15.7 | 19 | 12.1 | 28.1 | 0 | 37.3 | alto | 0 |
| 2016-08-03 | 0 | 0 | 30.6 | 15.1 | 20 | 15.3 | 32 | 0 | 40.7 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2016-08-04 | 0 | 0 | 27.3 | 17.9 | 30 | 10.3 | 25.6 | 0 | 32.7 | alto | 0 |
| 2016-08-05 | 0 | 0 | 29.2 | 18.5 | 23 | 15.7 | 35.6 | 0 | 37.6 | alto | 0 |
| 2016-08-06 | 0 | 0 | 29.1 | 17.8 | 29 | 16.2 | 36 | 0 | 38.4 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2016-08-07 | 0 | 0 | 26.7 | 19.1 | 34 | 15.4 | 34.9 | 0 | 34.3 | alto | 0 |
| 2016-08-08 | 0 | 0 | 26.3 | 19.8 | 34 | 16.8 | 38.2 | 0 | 34.7 | alto | 0 |
It is generated in your browser from this page’s data: one file per fire, aggregated by day and without individual hotspots.
Live widget for your story
It updates itself while the fire is still active and links to this page. Free, with the attribution shown at the bottom.
Sources for this page: GWIS (Copernicus), NASA FIRMS (VIIRS), ERA5 (ECMWF/Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0), GHSL (JRC). Open-Meteo.com · How we build fire pages: methodology
- Burnt area
- 10,570ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 5days
- 25 Jul 2016 – 29 Jul 2016
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- districts
- Started on
- 25 Jul
- 2016
- Heat detections
- 327
- in a single hotspot: 90 MW
- Danger at start
- 39
- Very high · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 490MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
HOTSPOTS BY DAY
25 Jul29 Jul
29 Jul 2016
How it evolved, day by day
25 Jul
26 Jul
27 Jul
28 Jul
29 Jul
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
32°high
40km/h · peak gust
19%lowest humidity
It had gone 32 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.
This area had burned before
No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
Serengeti where it started10,643 ha reached on 25 Jul1.0 %
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 2015Built-up area0.15 ha
Residents< 20
Inside the perimeter there were about 0.15 hectares of built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2015, 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 | Rain | Danger (FWI) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 Jul | 30.5 °C | 20 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 39 |
| 26 Jul | 30.7 °C | 19 % | 39 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 40 |
| 27 Jul | 32.2 °C | 19 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 34 |
| 28 Jul | 28.5 °C | 26 % | 30 km/h | 0.1 mm | High 36 |
| 29 Jul | 30.5 °C | 22 % | 33 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 37 |
| 30 Jul after | 30.9 °C | 19 % | 29 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 36 |
| 31 Jul after | 30.1 °C | 24 % | 25 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 33 |
| 1 Aug after | 32.0 °C | 20 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 36 |
| 2 Aug after | 31.5 °C | 19 % | 28 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 37 |
| 3 Aug after | 30.6 °C | 20 % | 32 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 41 |
| 4 Aug after | 27.3 °C | 30 % | 26 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 33 |
| 5 Aug after | 29.2 °C | 23 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 38 |
| 6 Aug after | 29.1 °C | 29 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 38 |
| 7 Aug after | 26.7 °C | 34 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 34 |
| 8 Aug after | 26.3 °C | 34 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 35 |
Its twins: fires that started in the same weather
It started with an FWI of 39.0, a minimum humidity of 20% and 32 days without rain. Fires in the area that started in weather like this since 2016: 33.
FWI at the start
39.0
Minimum humidity
20 %
Days without rain
32
this fire
chosen twins
rest of the area
Almost identicalSimilar
Outlines of the closest twins
This fire · Serengeti fire, 25 July 2016
10,570 ha
5 days
FWI 39.0
Min. humidity 20 %
Bariadi fire, September 2018
6,291 ha
3 days
FWI 36.6
Min. humidity 21 %
50 km away, in 2018
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: 1.6 mm on 9 Oct.
Serengeti fire, July 2023
3,330 ha
5 days
FWI 35.9
Min. humidity 22 %
35 km away, in 2023
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
Narok West fire, March 2019
1,619 ha
1 day
FWI 38.7
Min. humidity 22 %
81 km away, in 2019
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: 8.6 mm on 9 Apr.
Meatu fire, August 2024
3,367 ha
5 days
FWI 35.7
Min. humidity 21 %
105 km away, in 2024
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
Serengeti fire, July 2021
4,343 ha
4 days
FWI 38.3
Min. humidity 23 %
29 km away, in 2021
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: 2.1 mm on 9 Aug.
What happened to them
- 5 days
- median duration
- 3,488 ha
- median area
- 3 %
- went past 10,000 ha
- 2.2 mm
- rain at the end (median; 22 of 33 had it)
It was 3.0 times larger than the median of its twins and lasted 5 days, against 5 days.
Only 1 of its 33 twins burned more. The weather on the first day does not explain everything: the wind in the following days, the fuel and the firefighting also count. In 11 of 33, not even 1 mm fell in the ten days after the end: they went out without rain. In the rest, the first rainy day brought a median of 2.2 mm.
This is a bank of analogues: it shows what usually happens, not what will happen. With fewer than 15 twins we give no figures. How we calculate it
How it ended
—first rain
—no rain in ten days
40km/h · max. gust
It was considered over on 29 Jul, and not even 1 mm fell in the following ten days: it went out without rain. Twins with rain when they ended: 22 of 33, with a median of 2.2 mm.
Weather on this page: Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)
How a twin is chosen
- Same area: fires that have already ended, less than 250 km from this one, since 2016.
- Same start: we compare the FWI on the first day, the minimum humidity that day and the run of days without rain before it. The slider sets how much they may differ.
- Only pages with final weather data (ERA5 reanalysis) calculated in the same way as this fire’s; agricultural and grass burns and pages with data under review are left out.
- Fires burning at the same time as this one (a week before or after) are left out: they share the same spell of weather and do not count as a precedent.
- They are sorted by similarity, and the outlines of the first five are drawn.
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
↔
Before · 18 Jul 2016
After · 5 Aug 2016
Sentinel-2 did not pass over on that day. Try another date, or use false colour, which is daily.
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 · 327Every 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
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Serengeti fire last?
- According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 25 July 2016 to 29 July 2016 (5 days). The perimeter dates it from 25 July 2016 to 28 July 2016.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 10,570 hectares (105.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Serengeti (10,643 ha, 1.0 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 32.2 °C, humidity dropped to 19 % and gusts hit 40 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 40, class Very high.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Tanzania (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.
- How did the fires that started in similar weather in this area end?
- Fires less than 250 km away that started since 2016 with a similar FWI, humidity and dry spell: 33. Their median duration was 5 days and their median area 3,488 ha; 3 % went past 10,000 ha. Only 1 of its 33 twins burned more. The weather on the first day does not explain everything: the wind in the following days, the fuel and the firefighting also count. In 11 of 33, not even 1 mm fell in the ten days after the end: they went out without rain. In the rest, the first rainy day brought a median of 2.2 mm.
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: 112 · Emergency number and official warnings
Satellite cross-check
History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
- Last day with fire: 28 July 2016 → 29 July 2016.
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
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 25 July 2016 to 28 July 2016. 327 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 2015, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.
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.