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Tazovsky Rayon fire, 14 July 2016 Tazovsky Rayon

Out · last detection 27 Jul 2016, 07:03 UTC

The fire started on 14 July 2016 in Tazovsky Rayon, Russia, and satellites saw it burning for 14 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 35,196 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 10th largest in Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug since 2016 (of 123 with a page). Number 33 in Russia in 2016, of 692.

Compare with…
Burnt area
35,196ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
14days
14 Jul 2016 – 27 Jul 2016
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
14 Jul
2016
Heat detections
4,645
in a single hotspot: 241 MW
Danger at start
3
Very low · FWI index
Average daily power
4.0GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 14 Jul27 Jul
27 Jul 2016

How it evolved, day by day

14 Jul 2016 · 47 MW · 13 15 Jul 2016 · 1,418 MW · 100 16 Jul 2016 · 11,786 MW · 476 17 Jul 2016 · 6,640 MW · 347 18 Jul 2016 · 4,603 MW · 471 19 Jul 2016 · 3,901 MW · 430 20 Jul 2016 · 5,122 MW · 500 21 Jul 2016 · 3,451 MW · 552 22 Jul 2016 · 6,530 MW · 447 23 Jul 2016 · 1,341 MW · 127 24 Jul 2016 · 38 MW · 21 25 Jul 2016 · 1,021 MW · 261 26 Jul 2016 · 9,876 MW · 894 27 Jul 2016 · 33 MW · 6
14 Jul 16 Jul 18 Jul 20 Jul 22 Jul 24 Jul 26 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

29°high
47km/h · peak gust
29%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 4.9 mm on 2 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 22% of the area of London (352 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. Tazovsky Rayon where it started
    31,339 ha
    0.2 %

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 2015
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable 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)
14 Jul 22.6 °C 42 % 30 km/h 3.6 mm Very low 3
15 Jul 25.9 °C 33 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 12
16 Jul 27.4 °C 32 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
17 Jul 26.7 °C 29 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
18 Jul 27.4 °C 33 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
19 Jul 27.1 °C 30 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
20 Jul 26.7 °C 45 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
21 Jul 29.0 °C 35 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
22 Jul 28.1 °C 38 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
23 Jul 19.0 °C 44 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
24 Jul 15.8 °C 47 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
25 Jul 16.8 °C 44 % 32 km/h 0.2 mm Moderate 20
26 Jul 18.7 °C 40 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
27 Jul 19.0 °C 52 % 36 km/h 1.6 mm Low 9
28 Jul after 12.1 °C 48 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
29 Jul after 13.1 °C 59 % 39 km/h 0.2 mm Moderate 13
30 Jul after 13.5 °C 47 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 15
31 Jul after 12.9 °C 52 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
1 Aug after 18.7 °C 40 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
2 Aug after 17.3 °C 72 % 49 km/h 4.9 mm Very low 3

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 7 Jul 2016
After · 3 Aug 2016

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 · 4,645Every 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

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Tazovsky Rayon fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 14 July 2016 and 27 July 2016: 14 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 35,196 hectares (352.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Tazovsky Rayon (31,339 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 29.0 °C, humidity dropped to 29 % and gusts hit 47 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 30, 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.

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 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. 4,645 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.

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.