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Solnechny Rayon fire, 11 May 2026 Solnechny Rayon

Out · last detection 31 May 2026, 03:57 UTC

The fire started on 11 May 2026 in Solnechny Rayon, Russia, and satellites saw it burning for 21 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 24,989 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 41 in Russia in 2026, of 420.

GWIS near-real-time perimeter, from the layer that changed in October 2025: this fire is not compared with fires from earlier years, because since then the GWIS layer gives more and larger perimeters.

Compare with…
Burnt area
24,989ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
21days
11 May 2026 – 31 May 2026
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
11 May
2026
Heat detections
1,130
in a single hotspot: 374 MW
Danger at start
10
Low · FWI index
Average daily power
575MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 11 May31 May
31 May 2026

How it evolved, day by day

11 May 2026 · 75 MW · 7 12 May 2026 · 61 MW · 16 13 May 2026 · 221 MW · 20 14 May 2026 · 3 MW · 2 15 May 2026 · 83 MW · 9 16 May 2026 · 110 MW · 29 17 May 2026 · 90 MW · 15 18 May 2026 · 11 MW · 2 19 May 2026 · 69 MW · 19 20 May 2026 · 144 MW · 36 21 May 2026 · 519 MW · 92 22 May 2026 · 1,435 MW · 126 24 May 2026 · 1,036 MW · 121 25 May 2026 · 864 MW · 102 26 May 2026 · 1,673 MW · 198 27 May 2026 · 4,257 MW · 233 28 May 2026 · 170 MW · 68 30 May 2026 · 37 MW · 26 31 May 2026 · 63 MW · 9
11 May 15 May 19 May 24 May 27 May

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 (48 passes) and with what wind. Watch the film

The weather it burned in

24°high
83km/h · peak gust
11%lowest humidity

It had gone 4 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 10.3 mm on 1 Jun.

This area had burned before

21% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 4,456 ha in 2018, 862 ha in 2020, 80 ha in 2023.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 16% of the area of London (250 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. Solnechny Rayon where it started
    24,977 ha reached on 11 May
    0.8 %

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 area0.19 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.19 hectares of 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)

Started with Strong wind: 9.7 % of the area in Russia

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
11 May 10.1 °C 25 % 83 km/h 1.3 mm Low 10
12 May 15.6 °C 21 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Low 9
13 May 17.8 °C 23 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Low 7
14 May 22.0 °C 26 % 62 km/h 0.9 mm Moderate 12
15 May 14.2 °C 15 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 16
16 May 18.5 °C 13 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
17 May 18.7 °C 21 % 56 km/h 0.6 mm High 29
18 May 10.6 °C 31 % 31 km/h 0.9 mm Very low 4
19 May 16.3 °C 12 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 16
20 May 15.6 °C 25 % 37 km/h 0.5 mm Low 11
21 May 20.0 °C 14 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
22 May 23.8 °C 15 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
23 May 21.1 °C 24 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
24 May 18.7 °C 35 % 41 km/h 0.1 mm High 24
25 May 21.1 °C 31 % 55 km/h 1.5 mm Low 11
26 May 14.6 °C 32 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
27 May 16.3 °C 11 % 62 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
28 May 17.5 °C 23 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
29 May 10.5 °C 47 % 58 km/h 4.0 mm Moderate 17
30 May 14.3 °C 30 % 60 km/h 0.7 mm Low 8
31 May 15.0 °C 57 % 32 km/h 3.1 mm Very low 3
1 Jun after 11.1 °C 81 % 53 km/h 10.3 mm Very low 0

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 4 May 2026
After · 7 Jun 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 28 May 2026 the air beside the fire reached 117 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 69: 4.6 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak117 µg/m³
Days over the guideline14 days
PM10119 µg/m³
Optical depth1.19
9 May15 May21 May27 May2 Jun
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 · 1,130Every 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 Russia

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Solnechny Rayon fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 11 May 2026 and 31 May 2026: 21 days between the first and last heat detection of the perimeter.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 24,989 hectares (249.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Solnechny Rayon (24,977 ha, 0.8 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 23.8 °C, humidity dropped to 11 % and gusts hit 83 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 36, class High.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Russia (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: 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.

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 112.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 1,130 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 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 (Open Data Commons Open Database License 1.0). 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.