How long did the Wau fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 9 December 2020 to 31 December 2020 (23 days). The perimeter dates it from 13 December 2020 to 27 December 2020.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 9,077 hectares (90.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Wau (9,139 ha, 0.5 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 37.3 °C, humidity dropped to 13 % and gusts hit 37 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 52, class Extreme.

Where does this data come from?

From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of South Sudan (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

SS · South Sudan · 2020-12-09 → 2020-12-31

Wau fire, 9 December 2020 Wau

Out · last detection 31 Dec 2020, 23:48 UTC

The fire started on 9 December 2020 in Wau, South Sudan, and satellites saw it burning for 23 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 9,077 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 173th largest in Western Bahr el Ghazal since 2016 (of 430 with a page). Number 66 in South Sudan in 2020, of 190.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Wau · 2016 Wau · 2017 Wau · 2017 Raga · 2025

Burnt area: 9,077ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 23days; 9 Dec 2020 – 31 Dec 2020
Municipalities hit: 1; counties
Started on: 9 Dec; 2020
Heat detections: 360; in a single hotspot: 92 MW
Danger at start: 41; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 115MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 9 Dec31 Dec

Play back 31 Dec 2020

How it evolved, day by day

9 Dec 13 Dec 16 Dec 19 Dec 21 Dec 22 Dec 25 Dec 29 Dec

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

The weather it burned in

37°high

37km/h · peak gust

13%lowest humidity

It had gone 35 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

84% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 5,293 ha in 2016, 4,568 ha in 2017, 2,577 ha in 2019. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 7,587 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 5.7% of the area of London (91 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

Wau where it started

9,139 ha reached on 9 Dec

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	Danger (FWI)
9 Dec	36.4 °C	16 %	21 km/h	Very high 41
10 Dec	35.7 °C	22 %	19 km/h	Very high 39
11 Dec	36.4 °C	21 %	24 km/h	Very high 41
12 Dec	36.9 °C	18 %	24 km/h	Very high 43
13 Dec	37.2 °C	16 %	24 km/h	Very high 41
14 Dec	36.1 °C	20 %	23 km/h	Very high 42
15 Dec	37.1 °C	15 %	28 km/h	Very high 45
16 Dec	36.5 °C	13 %	37 km/h	Very high 50
17 Dec	35.2 °C	14 %	36 km/h	Extreme 50
18 Dec	34.9 °C	15 %	32 km/h	Very high 48
19 Dec	34.9 °C	16 %	32 km/h	Very high 48
20 Dec	35.3 °C	17 %	34 km/h	Very high 49
21 Dec	35.5 °C	18 %	33 km/h	Very high 50
22 Dec	36.0 °C	18 %	27 km/h	Very high 46
23 Dec	36.7 °C	19 %	26 km/h	Very high 46
24 Dec	36.6 °C	19 %	32 km/h	Very high 49
25 Dec	37.1 °C	18 %	26 km/h	Very high 47
26 Dec	36.5 °C	17 %	34 km/h	Extreme 50
27 Dec	36.4 °C	19 %	31 km/h	Very high 48
28 Dec	36.4 °C	17 %	32 km/h	Very high 50
29 Dec	36.6 °C	14 %	34 km/h	Extreme 51
30 Dec	37.1 °C	17 %	31 km/h	Very high 49
31 Dec	37.3 °C	13 %	35 km/h	Extreme 52
1 Jan after	37.1 °C	14 %	30 km/h	Very high 49
2 Jan after	36.4 °C	17 %	27 km/h	Extreme 50
3 Jan after	36.7 °C	15 %	26 km/h	Very high 48
4 Jan after	36.8 °C	17 %	37 km/h	Extreme 55
5 Jan after	36.6 °C	15 %	38 km/h	Extreme 55
6 Jan after	36.8 °C	15 %	39 km/h	Extreme 56
7 Jan after	36.5 °C	14 %	36 km/h	Extreme 56
8 Jan after	35.7 °C	13 %	33 km/h	Extreme 53
9 Jan after	34.9 °C	16 %	31 km/h	Extreme 52
10 Jan after	35.1 °C	12 %	35 km/h	Extreme 54

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 2 Dec 2020

After · 7 Jan 2021

Before After

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 · 360Every 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 time	Satellite	FRP (MW)	Lat	Lon

Other fires nearby

All fires in South Sudan ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Wau fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 9 December 2020 to 31 December 2020 (23 days). The perimeter dates it from 13 December 2020 to 27 December 2020.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 9,077 hectares (90.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Wau (9,139 ha, 0.5 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 37.3 °C, humidity dropped to 13 % and gusts hit 37 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 52, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of South Sudan (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.

Satellite cross-check

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

History of this page · 2 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

26 October 2026 Last day with fire: 27 December 2020 → 31 December 2020.
26 October 2026 Start date: 13 December 2020 → 9 December 2020.

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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What really happened?

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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 13 December 2020 to 27 December 2020. 360 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 (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY 3.0 IGO)). 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.

Where it burned