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Verkhoyansky Ulus fire, June 2024 Verkhoyansky Ulus

Out · last detection 3 Jul 2024, 03:02 UTC

The fire started on 27 June 2024 in Verkhoyansky Ulus, Russia, and satellites saw it burning for 7 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 10,780 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 477th largest in Sakha Republic since 2016 (of 1422 with a page). Number 145 in Russia in 2024, of 560.

Compare with…
Burnt area
10,780ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
7days
27 Jun 2024 – 3 Jul 2024
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
27 Jun
2024
Heat detections
1,782
in a single hotspot: 595 MW
Danger at start
22
High · FWI index
Average daily power
3.4GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

3 Jul 2024
HOTSPOTS BY DAY 27 Jun3 Jul

How it evolved, day by day

27 Jun 2024 · 8 MW · 3 28 Jun 2024 · 1,690 MW · 201 29 Jun 2024 · 3,560 MW · 286 30 Jun 2024 · 11,988 MW · 499 1 Jul 2024 · 3,363 MW · 365 2 Jul 2024 · 2,418 MW · 201 3 Jul 2024 · 476 MW · 25
27 Jun 28 Jun 29 Jun 30 Jun 1 Jul 2 Jul 3 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

27°high
53km/h · peak gust
20%lowest humidity

It had gone 2 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 8.4 mm on 4 Jul.

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 6.8% of the area of London (108 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
    11,345 ha
    0.1 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance is from the town centre to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.

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 Jun 27.3 °C 25 % 15 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
23 Jun 23.3 °C 38 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
24 Jun 23.8 °C 27 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
25 Jun 16.1 °C 53 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
26 Jun 9.9 °C 51 % 46 km/h 0.9 mm Moderate 11
27 Jun 8.1 °C 51 % 37 km/h 0.7 mm Low 10
28 Jun 18.6 °C 30 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 16
29 Jun 22.6 °C 27 % 18 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
30 Jun 26.1 °C 20 % 53 km/h 0.4 mm High 36
1 Jul 16.8 °C 35 % 40 km/h 1.8 mm Low 10
2 Jul 20.0 °C 30 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 16
3 Jul 21.8 °C 27 % 40 km/h 0.7 mm High 23
4 Jul after 11.1 °C 63 % 39 km/h 8.4 mm Very low 0

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 20 Jun 2024
After · 10 Jul 2024

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 2 July 2024 the air beside the fire reached 71 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 45: 3.0 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak71 µg/m³
Days over the guideline2 days
PM10101 µg/m³
Optical depth1.31
252627282930123456
Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

Particles from the Copernicus CAMS model at the centre of the perimeter; these are not measurements in each town. The pale bar is the worst hour, the solid one the daily average.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)

Detections table · 1,782Every 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 27 June 2024 and 3 July 2024: 7 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 10,780 hectares (107.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Verkhoyansky Ulus (11,345 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 27.3 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 53 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 36, 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

Satellite cross-check

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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 1,782 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.

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.