How long did the Ulytauskiy fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 20 July 2017 to 30 July 2017 (11 days). The perimeter dates it from 21 July 2017 to 27 July 2017.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 17,585 hectares (175.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Ulytauskiy (17,311 ha, 0.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 38.4 °C, humidity dropped to 15 % and gusts hit 61 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 75, class Very extreme.

Where does this data come from?

From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Kazakhstan (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

KZ · Kazakhstan · 2017-07-20 → 2017-07-30

Ulytauskiy fire, 20 July 2017 Ұлытау ауданы · Ulytauskiy

Out · last detection 30 Jul 2017, 22:33 UTC

The fire started on 20 July 2017 in Ulytauskiy, Kazakhstan, and satellites saw it burning for 11 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 17,585 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 13th largest in Karaganda Region since 2016 (of 222 with a page). Number 18 in Kazakhstan in 2017, of 239.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Ulytauskiy · 2017 Ulytauskiy · 2017 Ulytauskiy · 2017 Ulytauskiy · 2017

Burnt area: 17,585ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 11days; 20 Jul 2017 – 30 Jul 2017
Municipalities hit: 1; districts
Started on: 20 Jul; 2017
Heat detections: 936; in a single hotspot: 240 MW
Danger at start: 45; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 1.5GW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 20 Jul30 Jul

Play back 30 Jul 2017

How it evolved, day by day

20 Jul 22 Jul 24 Jul 27 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

38°high

61km/h · peak gust

15%lowest humidity

It had gone 51 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?

It burned the equivalent of 11% of the area of London (176 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

Ulytauskiy Ұлытау ауданы where it started

17,311 ha reached on 20 Jul

0.1 %

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)
20 Jul	31.9 °C	18 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
21 Jul	34.1 °C	20 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
22 Jul	35.2 °C	19 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
23 Jul	38.1 °C	16 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
24 Jul	37.6 °C	18 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
25 Jul	38.4 °C	15 %	61 km/h	0.0 mm	Very extreme 75
26 Jul	34.4 °C	22 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 53
27 Jul	33.0 °C	20 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
28 Jul	30.1 °C	27 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 50
29 Jul	32.6 °C	21 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 44
30 Jul	35.1 °C	20 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 49
31 Jul after	33.7 °C	17 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 59
1 Aug after	34.7 °C	17 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 49
2 Aug after	36.5 °C	16 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 52
3 Aug after	29.6 °C	27 %	36 km/h	0.6 mm	Very high 44
4 Aug after	29.9 °C	22 %	49 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 52
5 Aug after	34.3 °C	22 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 42
6 Aug after	38.4 °C	13 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 53
7 Aug after	37.6 °C	19 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 69
8 Aug after	33.6 °C	15 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 60
9 Aug after	35.9 °C	16 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 55

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 13 Jul 2017

After · 6 Aug 2017

Before After

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 · 936Every 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

All fires in Kazakhstan ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Ulytauskiy fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 20 July 2017 to 30 July 2017 (11 days). The perimeter dates it from 21 July 2017 to 27 July 2017.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 17,585 hectares (175.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Ulytauskiy (17,311 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 38.4 °C, humidity dropped to 15 % and gusts hit 61 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 75, class Very extreme.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Kazakhstan (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

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

History of this page · 2 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

25 October 2026 Last day with fire: 27 July 2017 → 30 July 2017.
25 October 2026 Start date: 21 July 2017 → 20 July 2017.

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.

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What do you think is wrong?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

What really happened?

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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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 21 July 2017 to 27 July 2017. 936 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.

Where it burned