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Verkhoyansky Ulus fire, 20 July 2020 Verkhoyansky Ulus

Out · last detection 9 Aug 2020, 04:43 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 71,693 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 53th largest in Sakha Republic since 2016 (of 1422 with a page). Number 7 in Russia in 2020, of 592.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Verkhoyansky Ulus · 2019Verkhoyansky Ulus · 2020Verkhoyansky Ulus · 2020Verkhoyansky Ulus · 2018

Burnt area
71,693ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
21days
20 Jul 2020 – 9 Aug 2020
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
20 Jul
2020
Heat detections
16,315
in a single hotspot: 424 MW
Danger at start
24
High · FWI index
Average daily power
6.6GW
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 · 1 MW · 1 21 Jul 2020 · 852 MW · 137 22 Jul 2020 · 10,159 MW · 897 23 Jul 2020 · 15,313 MW · 1594 24 Jul 2020 · 19,987 MW · 1267 25 Jul 2020 · 1,405 MW · 142 26 Jul 2020 · 1,043 MW · 255 27 Jul 2020 · 4,939 MW · 177 28 Jul 2020 · 60 MW · 26 29 Jul 2020 · 178 MW · 82 30 Jul 2020 · 3,058 MW · 400 31 Jul 2020 · 4,499 MW · 849 1 Aug 2020 · 6,032 MW · 1266 2 Aug 2020 · 16,556 MW · 2000 3 Aug 2020 · 2,210 MW · 650 4 Aug 2020 · 9,516 MW · 1589 5 Aug 2020 · 8,099 MW · 1339 6 Aug 2020 · 17,415 MW · 2099 7 Aug 2020 · 12,764 MW · 977 8 Aug 2020 · 812 MW · 231 9 Aug 2020 · 2,854 MW · 337
20 Jul 23 Jul 24 Jul 26 Jul 29 Jul 1 Aug 4 Aug 7 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

31°high
54km/h · peak gust
23%lowest humidity

It had gone 4 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 7.5 mm on 10 Aug.

This area had burned before

0% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 119 ha in 2019.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 45% of the area of London (717 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
    70,401 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 28.1 °C 34 % 39 km/h 0.2 mm High 24
14 Jul 19.7 °C 50 % 54 km/h 1.1 mm Moderate 14
15 Jul 20.8 °C 34 % 32 km/h 0.1 mm Moderate 17
16 Jul 14.5 °C 46 % 29 km/h 0.9 mm Low 10
17 Jul 13.9 °C 55 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Low 10
18 Jul 24.6 °C 49 % 34 km/h 1.0 mm Moderate 12
19 Jul 20.7 °C 66 % 26 km/h 1.3 mm Low 7
20 Jul 25.5 °C 54 % 27 km/h 0.9 mm Low 10
21 Jul 30.7 °C 29 % 41 km/h 0.2 mm High 28
22 Jul 27.6 °C 27 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
23 Jul 26.6 °C 30 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
24 Jul 26.9 °C 29 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
25 Jul 27.8 °C 27 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
26 Jul 22.8 °C 35 % 41 km/h 3.1 mm Low 8
27 Jul 19.0 °C 41 % 41 km/h 0.5 mm Moderate 14
28 Jul 14.1 °C 55 % 36 km/h 0.2 mm Moderate 14
29 Jul 11.2 °C 53 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 13
30 Jul 14.3 °C 47 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
31 Jul 18.3 °C 39 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 16
1 Aug 21.9 °C 34 % 19 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
2 Aug 20.6 °C 37 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
3 Aug 18.6 °C 40 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
4 Aug 18.8 °C 34 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
5 Aug 21.6 °C 23 % 20 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
6 Aug 23.5 °C 30 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
7 Aug 23.4 °C 39 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
8 Aug 18.3 °C 48 % 32 km/h 1.8 mm Low 7
9 Aug 20.5 °C 41 % 34 km/h 0.3 mm Moderate 14
10 Aug after 12.5 °C 68 % 35 km/h 7.5 mm Very low 0

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 · 16,315Every 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 71,693 hectares (716.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Verkhoyansky Ulus (70,401 ha, 0.5 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 30.7 °C, humidity dropped to 23 % and gusts hit 54 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 31, 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; 3 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 16,315 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.