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Verkhoyansky Ulus fire, 20 July 2020 Verkhoyansky Ulus

Out · last detection 9 Aug 2020, 03:02 UTC

The fire started on 20 July 2020 in Verkhoyansky Ulus, Russia, and satellites saw it burning for 21 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 69,501 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 55th largest in Sakha Republic since 2016 (of 1422 with a page). Number 9 in Russia in 2020, of 592.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Verkhoyansky Ulus · 2020Verkhoyansky Ulus · 2018Verkhoyansky Ulus · 2018Verkhoyansky Ulus · 2020

Burnt area
69,501ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
21days
20 Jul 2020 – 9 Aug 2020
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
20 Jul
2020
Heat detections
10,593
in a single hotspot: 500 MW
Danger at start
21
Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power
6.0GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 20 Jul9 Aug
9 Aug 2020

How it evolved, day by day

20 Jul 2020 · 208 MW · 40 21 Jul 2020 · 18,622 MW · 907 22 Jul 2020 · 14,013 MW · 1102 23 Jul 2020 · 23,557 MW · 1711 24 Jul 2020 · 18,375 MW · 1395 25 Jul 2020 · 4,348 MW · 289 26 Jul 2020 · 1,915 MW · 428 27 Jul 2020 · 3,203 MW · 235 30 Jul 2020 · 166 MW · 50 31 Jul 2020 · 1,082 MW · 201 1 Aug 2020 · 3,160 MW · 538 2 Aug 2020 · 4,030 MW · 715 3 Aug 2020 · 2,364 MW · 408 4 Aug 2020 · 3,094 MW · 565 5 Aug 2020 · 4,313 MW · 641 6 Aug 2020 · 6,368 MW · 943 7 Aug 2020 · 4,270 MW · 358 8 Aug 2020 · 110 MW · 31 9 Aug 2020 · 310 MW · 36
20 Jul 23 Jul 26 Jul 31 Jul 3 Aug 6 Aug 9 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
44km/h · peak gust
22%lowest humidity

It had gone 4 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.8 mm on 10 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 44% of the area of London (695 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
    67,795 ha reached on 20 Jul
    0.5 %

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)
13 Jul 26.4 °C 34 % 25 km/h 0.6 mm Moderate 21
14 Jul 18.1 °C 52 % 44 km/h 3.2 mm Very low 5
15 Jul 17.7 °C 46 % 26 km/h 0.8 mm Low 6
16 Jul 12.3 °C 52 % 24 km/h 1.2 mm Very low 5
17 Jul 13.8 °C 60 % 18 km/h 0.0 mm Low 5
18 Jul 23.7 °C 45 % 35 km/h 0.9 mm Low 11
19 Jul 21.1 °C 65 % 27 km/h 1.7 mm Very low 5
20 Jul 23.9 °C 58 % 30 km/h 0.4 mm Low 8
21 Jul 28.2 °C 32 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
22 Jul 25.0 °C 28 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
23 Jul 25.0 °C 27 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
24 Jul 25.2 °C 28 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
25 Jul 26.6 °C 22 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
26 Jul 21.5 °C 32 % 41 km/h 1.6 mm Moderate 13
27 Jul 18.2 °C 43 % 34 km/h 2.4 mm Very low 5
28 Jul 13.3 °C 52 % 36 km/h 1.6 mm Very low 5
29 Jul 10.8 °C 46 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Low 8
30 Jul 14.1 °C 42 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Low 10
31 Jul 17.6 °C 35 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 15
1 Aug 20.3 °C 31 % 19 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
2 Aug 20.1 °C 27 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
3 Aug 17.3 °C 35 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
4 Aug 17.5 °C 33 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
5 Aug 19.5 °C 27 % 18 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
6 Aug 21.9 °C 28 % 17 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
7 Aug 21.8 °C 36 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
8 Aug 16.7 °C 48 % 27 km/h 3.7 mm Very low 3
9 Aug 18.8 °C 48 % 31 km/h 0.2 mm Low 6
10 Aug after 11.7 °C 65 % 31 km/h 1.8 mm Very low 4

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 13 Jul 2020
After · 16 Aug 2020

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 · 10,593Every 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?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 20 July 2020 and 9 August 2020: 21 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 69,501 hectares (695.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Verkhoyansky Ulus (67,795 ha, 0.5 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 28.2 °C, humidity dropped to 22 % and gusts hit 44 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 28, 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.

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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; 6 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 10,593 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.