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Усть-Удинский район fire, 16 July 2016 Усть-Удинский район

Out · last detection 1 Aug 2016, 05:25 UTC

The fire started on 16 July 2016 in Усть-Удинский район, Russia, and satellites saw it burning for 17 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,822 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 207th largest in Irkutsk Oblast since 2016 (of 428 with a page). Number 355 in Russia in 2016, of 692.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Усть-Удинский район · 2017

Burnt area
5,822ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
17days
16 Jul 2016 – 1 Aug 2016
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
16 Jul
2016
Heat detections
937
in a single hotspot: 100 MW
Danger at start
12
Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power
599MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 16 Jul1 Aug
1 Aug 2016

How it evolved, day by day

16 Jul 2016 · 16 MW · 7 17 Jul 2016 · 3 MW · 2 19 Jul 2016 · 155 MW · 27 20 Jul 2016 · 224 MW · 24 21 Jul 2016 · 517 MW · 68 22 Jul 2016 · 1,714 MW · 131 23 Jul 2016 · 1,498 MW · 135 24 Jul 2016 · 2,466 MW · 168 25 Jul 2016 · 658 MW · 119 26 Jul 2016 · 643 MW · 96 27 Jul 2016 · 387 MW · 73 28 Jul 2016 · 108 MW · 12 29 Jul 2016 · 23 MW · 8 30 Jul 2016 · 745 MW · 42 31 Jul 2016 · 430 MW · 24 1 Aug 2016 · 3 MW · 1
16 Jul 20 Jul 23 Jul 24 Jul 26 Jul 29 Jul 1 Aug

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

The weather it burned in

28°high
39km/h · peak gust
26%lowest humidity

It had gone 2 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 21.1 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 3.7% of the area of London (58 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. Усть-Удинский район where it started
    5,790 ha reached on 16 Jul
    0.3 %

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)
16 Jul 25.7 °C 29 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 12
17 Jul 23.0 °C 38 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
18 Jul 22.0 °C 37 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 13
19 Jul 21.1 °C 41 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
20 Jul 24.7 °C 31 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 15
21 Jul 25.6 °C 35 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 15
22 Jul 25.8 °C 30 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
23 Jul 25.7 °C 30 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
24 Jul 25.8 °C 27 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
25 Jul 27.2 °C 28 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
26 Jul 28.2 °C 26 % 17 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
27 Jul 26.1 °C 41 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
28 Jul 23.9 °C 54 % 30 km/h 1.0 mm Low 10
29 Jul 23.2 °C 56 % 22 km/h 0.2 mm Low 11
30 Jul 27.5 °C 43 % 33 km/h 1.8 mm Low 8
31 Jul 25.0 °C 52 % 36 km/h 4.0 mm Very low 4
1 Aug 24.2 °C 43 % 38 km/h 0.1 mm Low 8
2 Aug after 15.6 °C 79 % 36 km/h 21.1 mm Very low 0

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 9 Jul 2016
After · 8 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 · 937Every 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 Усть-Удинский район fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 16 July 2016 to 1 August 2016 (17 days). The perimeter dates it from 16 July 2016 to 31 July 2016.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 5,822 hectares (58.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Усть-Удинский район (5,790 ha, 0.3 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 28.2 °C, humidity dropped to 26 % and gusts hit 39 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 20, class Moderate.
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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 31 July 2016 → 1 August 2016.

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.
  • Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 16 July 2016 to 31 July 2016. 937 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.