Burned area
satellite only9,822ha
Perimeter published by GWIS (Copernicus).
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus)
- Date
- 13 Jan 2026 – 21 Jan 2026
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page to compare it with.
SS · South Sudan · –
Wulu fire, 13 January 2026 Wulu
Out · last detection 20 Jan 2026, 23:43 UTC
The fire started on 13 January 2026 in Wulu, South Sudan, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 9,822 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
Number 51 in South Sudan in 2026, of 214.
GWIS near-real-time perimeter, from the layer that changed in August 2025: this fire is not compared with fires from earlier years, because since then the GWIS layer gives more and larger perimeters.
Use this data
Compare with…
Suggestions: Wulu · 2017Wulu · 2024Wulu · 2017Wulu · 2022
Use this data
Fire page data · version 2026-10-24matches the official recordwith caveatssatellite onlymodel
When copying, the sentence is
Tick the figures you want: they make up the lede and the CSV.
Duration by satellite
satellite only9days
13 Jan 2026 to 21 Jan 2026: first and last day with fire on the page.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- last detection: 20 Jan 2026, 23:43 UTC
+− cross-check
Satellites pass a few times a day and cloud or smoke can hide the fire: a lack of detections is not an official extinction. Each country’s emergency service declares a fire contained or out.
Start
satellite only13 Jan 2026
First day with fire seen by the satellites or the perimeter.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- 13 Jan 2026
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page, so the alert time and the cause are not known here.
Hotspots
satellite only215
VIIRS detections at 375 m. Most intense hotspot: 75 MW.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (Suomi NPP)
- Date
- 13 Jan 2026 – 21 Jan 2026
+− cross-check
There is no official record to compare with. Each hotspot is a pixel detected in one satellite pass, not a separate fire.
The worst day
satellite only741MW
Total radiative power on 15 January 2026; hotspots that day: 43.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (FRP)
- Date
- 15 Jan 2026
+− cross-check
Fire radiative power (FRP) measures the energy the fire gives off when the satellite passes. Added up by day, it compares intensity, not area.
Danger at the start
model48.2FWI · very high
Fire Weather Index (Canadian system) computed by WorldFires for the day the fire started. Consecutive days without rain before: 60.
- Source
- WorldFires calculation (Canadian FWI system)
- Date
- 13 Jan 2026, local noon
- Model
- ERA5 0,25° (ECMWF · Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com
+− cross-check
This is an index computed from weather model data, not a measurement of the fire nor an official warning. Danger warnings are issued by each country’s authority. Emergency number and official warnings
Weather during the fire
model37.1°C · 19% RH
High of 37.1 °C and minimum humidity of 19% on 20 January 2026; gusts of 42 km/h on 14 January 2026.
- Source
- weather model at the fire’s grid cell
- Date
- 13 Jan 2026 – 21 Jan 2026
- Model
- ERA5 0,25° (ECMWF · Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com
+− cross-check
These are model values for a cell of about 25 km, not from a weather station: they may differ from what was measured on the ground.
Living inside
model≈ 200people
Estimated residents inside the perimeter and 0.03 ha of built-up area (100 m grid, epoch 2025).
- Source
- GHSL R2023A · JRC
- Date
- calculated on 24 October 2026
+− cross-check
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.
This page’s change log has been kept since 24 October 2026: every night what it publishes is compared and the difference is logged. Anything earlier is reconstructed from each source’s date and marked as reconstructed.
Show
-
· reconstructed GHSLPopulation and built-up area computed
-
· reconstructed weatherWeather and FWI computed from the ERA5 reanalysis
What was saved on 24 October 2026
Every night a snapshot of what the page shows is saved. If anything changes, it appears in the list as a log entry.
- Area
- 9,822 ha
- Dates
- 13 Jan 2026 – 21 Jan 2026
- Name
- Wulu
- Official record
- —
Versioned permanent link
https://worldfires.org/en/fire/wulu-2026-01-4?v=2026-10-24A version keeps the area, dates, name and official record; the area as it was logged (changes under 2% are not logged). The map, hotspots and weather always show today’s data.
Citation
A lede of about 60 words figures only, no adjectives
CSV for this fire wulu-2026-01-4.csv · daily, no individual hotspots
| fecha | focos_viirs | frp_mw | tmax_c | tmin_c | hr_min_pct | viento_max_kmh | racha_max_kmh | precip_mm | fwi | clase_fwi | dentro_del_incendio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-01-13 | 2 | 6 | 35.9 | 20.4 | 20 | 16 | 38.5 | 0 | 48.2 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2026-01-14 | 15 | 68 | 35.1 | 21.4 | 21 | 17.3 | 42.1 | 0 | 49.7 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2026-01-15 | 43 | 741 | 34.8 | 20.3 | 22 | 16.5 | 38.9 | 0 | 48 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2026-01-16 | 27 | 51 | 34.2 | 20.7 | 18 | 15.9 | 37.1 | 0 | 47.7 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2026-01-17 | 73 | 257 | 35.5 | 19.3 | 16 | 12.1 | 31 | 0 | 44 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2026-01-18 | 21 | 272 | 36 | 19.9 | 16 | 15.1 | 36.7 | 0 | 47.5 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2026-01-19 | 28 | 177 | 36.4 | 20.4 | 17 | 14.7 | 37.1 | 0 | 47.4 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2026-01-20 | 6 | 8 | 37.1 | 21.6 | 19 | 14.3 | 36 | 0 | 47.3 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2026-01-21 | 0 | 0 | 35.7 | 21.6 | 20 | 15.4 | 36.4 | 0 | 48.9 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2026-01-22 | 0 | 0 | 37.6 | 22.7 | 18 | 14.5 | 36.7 | 0 | 48.2 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2026-01-23 | 0 | 0 | 37.8 | 22 | 17 | 12.3 | 28.1 | 0 | 46.1 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2026-01-24 | 0 | 0 | 37.8 | 21.7 | 19 | 13.2 | 34.2 | 0 | 47.4 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2026-01-25 | 0 | 0 | 38.4 | 22.1 | 12 | 21 | 47.5 | 0 | 60.2 | extremo | 0 |
| 2026-01-26 | 0 | 0 | 37.6 | 20.4 | 13 | 15.6 | 38.5 | 0 | 53.6 | extremo | 0 |
| 2026-01-27 | 0 | 0 | 36.9 | 22 | 16 | 14.5 | 37.1 | 0 | 52.5 | extremo | 0 |
| 2026-01-28 | 0 | 0 | 36.2 | 23.2 | 15 | 13.3 | 32.4 | 0 | 51.4 | extremo | 0 |
| 2026-01-29 | 0 | 0 | 36.3 | 21.5 | 16 | 13.1 | 34.6 | 0 | 51.5 | extremo | 0 |
| 2026-01-30 | 0 | 0 | 37.2 | 21.8 | 17 | 13.7 | 34.9 | 0 | 52.3 | extremo | 0 |
| 2026-01-31 | 0 | 0 | 36.7 | 23.7 | 15 | 14.8 | 36.4 | 0 | 53.9 | extremo | 0 |
It is generated in your browser from this page’s data: one file per fire, aggregated by day and without individual hotspots.
Live widget for your story
It updates itself while the fire is still active and links to this page. Free, with the attribution shown at the bottom.
Sources for this page: GWIS (Copernicus), NASA FIRMS (VIIRS), ERA5 (ECMWF/Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0), GHSL (JRC). Open-Meteo.com · How we build fire pages: methodology
- Burnt area
- 9,822ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 9days
- 13 Jan 2026 – 21 Jan 2026
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- counties
- Started on
- 13 Jan
- 2026
- Heat detections
- 215
- in a single hotspot: 75 MW
- Danger at start
- 48
- Very high · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 197MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
HOTSPOTS BY DAY
13 Jan21 Jan
20 Jan 2026
How it evolved, day by day
13 Jan
15 Jan
17 Jan
19 Jan
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
42km/h · peak gust
16%lowest humidity
It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.
This area had burned before
100% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 3,534 ha in 2016, 8,570 ha in 2017, 927 ha in 2019, 8,117 ha in 2020, 2,267 ha in 2021, 6,475 ha in 2022, 2,299 ha in 2023, 4,250 ha in 2024, 4,196 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 9,819 ha that had burned before.
- 4,299 ha Wulu fire, December 2017 9,777 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 4,164 ha Wulu fire, December 2024 28,216 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 3,576 ha Wulu fire, February 2017 5,783 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 2,175 ha Wulu fire, December 2022 17,556 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 2,060 ha Wulu fire, December 2016 61,053 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 1,767 ha Wulu fire, December 2023 22,366 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 1,347 ha Wulu fire, December 2020 6,829 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 894 ha Wulu fire, January 2022 8,549 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
Wulu where it started9,883 ha reached on 13 Jan0.8 %
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 2025Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents≈ 200
Inside the perimeter there were about 0.03 hectares of built-up land and about 200 residents (GHSL 2025, 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. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.
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)
Started with 60 days without rain: 13 % of the area in South Sudan
| Day | High | Min. humidity | Peak gust | Rain | Danger (FWI) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 13 Jan | 35.9 °C | 20 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 48 |
| 14 Jan | 35.1 °C | 21 % | 42 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 50 |
| 15 Jan | 34.8 °C | 22 % | 39 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 48 |
| 16 Jan | 34.2 °C | 18 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 48 |
| 17 Jan | 35.5 °C | 16 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 18 Jan | 36.0 °C | 16 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 48 |
| 19 Jan | 36.4 °C | 17 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 47 |
| 20 Jan | 37.1 °C | 19 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 47 |
| 21 Jan | 35.7 °C | 20 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 49 |
| 22 Jan after | 37.6 °C | 18 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 48 |
| 23 Jan after | 37.8 °C | 17 % | 28 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 46 |
| 24 Jan after | 37.8 °C | 19 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 47 |
| 25 Jan after | 38.4 °C | 12 % | 48 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 60 |
| 26 Jan after | 37.6 °C | 13 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 54 |
| 27 Jan after | 36.9 °C | 16 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 52 |
| 28 Jan after | 36.2 °C | 15 % | 32 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 51 |
| 29 Jan after | 36.3 °C | 16 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 52 |
| 30 Jan after | 37.2 °C | 17 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 52 |
| 31 Jan after | 36.7 °C | 15 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 54 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
↔
Before · 6 Jan 2026
After · 28 Jan 2026
Sentinel-2 did not pass over on that day. Try another date, or use false colour, which is daily.
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 · CopernicusOn 15 January 2026 the air beside the fire reached 73 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 47: 3.1 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
PM2.5 peak73 µg/m³
Days over the guideline14 days
PM1087 µg/m³
Optical depth0.76
WHO 15
11 Jan14 Jan17 Jan20 Jan23 Jan
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 · 215Every 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
- 28,216 haWulu18 December 2024 · 33 days · 12 km away
- 44,549 haWulu8 December 2025 · 23 days · 17 km away
- 61,053 haWulu5 December 2016 · 27 days · 21 km away
- 23,579 haWulu30 November 2017 · 19 days · 24 km away
- 23,328 haWulu4 December 2016 · 18 days · 26 km away
- 89,512 haNzara2 January 2024 · 32 days · 38 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Wulu fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 13 January 2026 and 21 January 2026: 9 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 9,822 hectares (98.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Wulu (9,883 ha, 0.8 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 37.1 °C, humidity dropped to 16 % and gusts hit 42 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 50, class Very high.
- 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
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 With cross-checks and a citable version
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
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. 215 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 2025, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.
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.