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Srednekolymsky Ulus fire, 23 July 2026 Srednekolymsky Ulus

Out · last detection 3 Aug 2026, 17:47 UTC

The fire started on 23 July 2026 in Srednekolymsky Ulus, Russia, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 46,950 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 26 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.

Burnt area
46,950ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
12days
23 Jul 2026 – 3 Aug 2026
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
23 Jul
2026
Heat detections
3,729
in a single hotspot: 541 MW
Danger at start
17
Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power
8.0GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 23 Jul3 Aug
3 Aug 2026

How it evolved, day by day

23 Jul 2026 · 447 MW · 19 24 Jul 2026 · 15,820 MW · 202 25 Jul 2026 · 6,970 MW · 328 26 Jul 2026 · 8,930 MW · 737 27 Jul 2026 · 6,969 MW · 318 30 Jul 2026 · 143 MW · 47 2 Aug 2026 · 8,892 MW · 540 3 Aug 2026 · 15,611 MW · 1538
24 Jul 27 Jul 2 Aug

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

The weather it burned in

28°high
51km/h · peak gust
24%lowest humidity

It had gone 13 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 10.3 mm on 4 Aug.

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 30% of the area of London (470 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. Srednekolymsky Ulus where it started
    49,250 ha reached on 23 Jul
    0.4 %

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 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)
23 Jul 23.3 °C 36 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 17
24 Jul 28.4 °C 24 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
25 Jul 22.9 °C 53 % 45 km/h 0.4 mm Moderate 19
26 Jul 13.6 °C 56 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 17
27 Jul 19.1 °C 47 % 41 km/h 1.9 mm Moderate 18
28 Jul 16.9 °C 73 % 31 km/h 5.5 mm Very low 1
29 Jul 11.7 °C 75 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very low 1
30 Jul 12.1 °C 59 % 21 km/h 0.1 mm Very low 2
31 Jul 13.6 °C 76 % 51 km/h 0.6 mm Very low 5
1 Aug 7.5 °C 60 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very low 2
2 Aug 14.3 °C 45 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Low 6
3 Aug 21.3 °C 45 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
4 Aug after 16.8 °C 68 % 55 km/h 10.3 mm Moderate 14

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 16 Jul 2026
After · 10 Aug 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 5 August 2026 the air beside the fire reached 274 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 181: 12 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak274 µg/m³
Days over the guideline14 days
PM10280 µg/m³
Optical depth2.79
21 Jul25 Jul29 Jul2 Aug6 Aug
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 · 3,729Every 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 Srednekolymsky Ulus fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 23 July 2026 and 3 August 2026: 12 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 46,950 hectares (469.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Srednekolymsky Ulus (49,250 ha, 0.4 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 28.4 °C, humidity dropped to 24 % and gusts hit 51 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 29, 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; 4 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 3,729 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.