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Verkhoyansky Ulus fire, 22 July 2019 Verkhoyansky Ulus

Out · last detection 8 Aug 2019, 04:24 UTC

The fire started on 22 July 2019 in Verkhoyansky Ulus, Russia, and satellites saw it burning for 18 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 7,698 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 657th largest in Sakha Republic since 2016 (of 1422 with a page). Number 224 in Russia in 2019, of 610.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Verkhoyansky Ulus · 2019Verkhoyansky Ulus · 2019Verkhoyansky Ulus · 2019Verkhoyansky Ulus · 2019

Burnt area
7,698ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
18days
22 Jul 2019 – 8 Aug 2019
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
22 Jul
2019
Heat detections
2,012
in a single hotspot: 76 MW
Danger at start
8
Low · FWI index
Average daily power
796MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 22 Jul8 Aug
8 Aug 2019

How it evolved, day by day

22 Jul 2019 · 60 MW · 21 23 Jul 2019 · 2,547 MW · 248 24 Jul 2019 · 42 MW · 33 27 Jul 2019 · 1 MW · 1 29 Jul 2019 · 1 MW · 1 30 Jul 2019 · 4 MW · 2 31 Jul 2019 · 185 MW · 55 1 Aug 2019 · 457 MW · 101 2 Aug 2019 · 1,435 MW · 224 3 Aug 2019 · 3,272 MW · 479 4 Aug 2019 · 2,864 MW · 626 5 Aug 2019 · 365 MW · 63 6 Aug 2019 · 333 MW · 93 7 Aug 2019 · 266 MW · 51 8 Aug 2019 · 106 MW · 14
22 Jul 27 Jul 31 Jul 3 Aug 6 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

26°high
40km/h · peak gust
24%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 6.4 mm on 9 Aug.

This area had burned before

1% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 110 ha in 2018.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 4.9% of the area of London (77 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. Verkhoyansky Ulus where it started
    7,756 ha reached on 22 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 2020
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2020, 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)
22 Jul 12.2 °C 44 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Low 8
23 Jul 21.1 °C 24 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 15
24 Jul 26.4 °C 28 % 22 km/h 0.1 mm Moderate 21
25 Jul 24.4 °C 37 % 36 km/h 0.8 mm Moderate 14
26 Jul 19.5 °C 61 % 39 km/h 7.0 mm Very low 1
27 Jul 10.0 °C 73 % 25 km/h 10.1 mm Very low 0
28 Jul 13.9 °C 50 % 17 km/h 0.0 mm Very low 0
29 Jul 13.6 °C 48 % 36 km/h 1.3 mm Very low 2
30 Jul 11.6 °C 50 % 40 km/h 0.5 mm Very low 3
31 Jul 13.7 °C 45 % 27 km/h 0.7 mm Very low 4
1 Aug 15.2 °C 42 % 18 km/h 0.1 mm Low 5
2 Aug 17.0 °C 32 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Low 9
3 Aug 19.0 °C 27 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 13
4 Aug 19.7 °C 30 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
5 Aug 19.7 °C 31 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
6 Aug 17.4 °C 56 % 36 km/h 1.0 mm Low 7
7 Aug 21.0 °C 36 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Low 11
8 Aug 19.7 °C 53 % 26 km/h 8.2 mm Very low 0
9 Aug after 16.7 °C 73 % 20 km/h 6.4 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 Jul 2019
After · 15 Aug 2019

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 · 2,012Every 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 Verkhoyansky Ulus fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 22 July 2019 to 8 August 2019 (18 days). The perimeter dates it from 29 July 2019 to 8 August 2019.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 7,698 hectares (77.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Verkhoyansky Ulus (7,756 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 26.4 °C, humidity dropped to 24 % and gusts hit 40 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 21, 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. Start date: 29 July 2019 → 22 July 2019.

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 29 July 2019 to 8 August 2019. 2,012 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 2020, 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.