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CN · China · –

Tuquan County fire, 22 March 2026 突泉县 · Tuquan County

Out · last detection 27 Mar 2026, 17:50 UTC

The fire started on 22 March 2026 in Tuquan County, China, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,114 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 936 in China in 2026, of 1105.

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.

The power measured by the satellite is low (9.0 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.

Burnt area
1,114ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
6days
22 Mar 2026 – 27 Mar 2026
Municipalities hit
1
counties
Started on
22 Mar
2026
Heat detections
19
in a single hotspot: 9 MW
Danger at start
11
Low · FWI index
Average daily power
11MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 22 Mar27 Mar
27 Mar 2026

How it evolved, day by day

23 Mar 2026 · 5 MW · 3 25 Mar 2026 · 30 MW · 11 26 Mar 2026 · 2 MW · 1 27 Mar 2026 · 7 MW · 4
23 Mar 25 Mar 26 Mar 27 Mar

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

The weather it burned in

17°high
45km/h · peak gust
14%lowest humidity

It had gone 8 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 5.9 mm on 3 Apr.

This area had burned before

17% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 187 ha in 2018.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 0.7% of the area of London (11 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. Tuquan County 突泉县 where it started
    1,111 ha reached on 23 Mar
    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 2025
Built-up area2.6 ha
Residents≈ 150

Inside the perimeter there were about 2.6 hectares of built-up land and about 150 residents (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 Very dry air: 14 % of the area in China

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
22 Mar 11.6 °C 14 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Low 11
23 Mar 13.5 °C 16 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Low 9
24 Mar 17.1 °C 19 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 13
25 Mar 14.9 °C 18 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
26 Mar 12.9 °C 24 % 40 km/h 0.2 mm Moderate 14
27 Mar 14.5 °C 17 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 16
28 Mar after 14.7 °C 15 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
29 Mar after 11.3 °C 17 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
30 Mar after 12.7 °C 17 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
31 Mar after 15.8 °C 16 % 58 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
1 Apr after 10.0 °C 12 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
2 Apr after 13.0 °C 13 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 16
3 Apr after 1.9 °C 51 % 48 km/h 5.9 mm Very low 0

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 15 Mar 2026
After · 3 Apr 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 21 March 2026 the air beside the fire reached 96 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 60: 4.0 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak96 µg/m³
Days over the guideline5 days
PM10112 µg/m³
Optical depth0.63
20 Mar23 Mar26 Mar29 Mar
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 · 19Every 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 China

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Tuquan County fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 22 March 2026 and 27 March 2026: 6 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 1,114 hectares (11.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Tuquan County (1,111 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 17.1 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 45 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 16, class Moderate.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of China (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: 119 · 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 119.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 19 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 ADM3 (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.