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Yiwu County fire, February 2024 伊吾县 · Yiwu County

Out · last measured on 19 Mar 2024

The fire started on 22 February 2024 in Yiwu County, China, and satellites saw it burning for 27 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,096 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

We are reviewing this page: some of its data look inconsistent (the place, the dates or the area), so treat them with caution.

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Suggestions: Yiwu County · 2026

We have the GWIS perimeter for this fire, but the VIIRS sensors did not capture it in enough detail: no day-by-day evolution, but the split by municipality is there.

Burnt area
1,096ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
27days
22 Feb 2024 – 19 Mar 2024
Municipalities hit
1
counties
Started on
22 Feb
2024
Danger at start
7
Low · FWI index

Where it burned

The weather it burned in

20°high
72km/h · peak gust
9%lowest humidity

It had gone 34 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

94% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,924 ha in 2018, 2,469 ha in 2019, 787 ha in 2020, 2,192 ha in 2021, 2,642 ha in 2022, 5,426 ha in 2023. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,029 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 0.7% of the area of London (11 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. Yiwu County 伊吾县 where it started
    1,098 ha
    0.1 %

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 2025
Built-up area15 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 15 hectares of built-up land and almost nobody lived there (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)

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
22 Feb -2.6 °C 34 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Low 7
23 Feb -1.5 °C 39 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Very low 4
24 Feb 2.7 °C 36 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm Very low 3
25 Feb 0.6 °C 39 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very low 4
26 Feb -0.1 °C 26 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very low 5
27 Feb 0.6 °C 25 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very low 4
28 Feb 0.7 °C 30 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very low 4
29 Feb 0.9 °C 30 % 18 km/h 0.0 mm Very low 4
1 Mar 3.0 °C 26 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Very low 4
2 Mar 5.9 °C 22 % 19 km/h 0.0 mm Very low 4
3 Mar 4.0 °C 28 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Low 8
4 Mar 3.1 °C 24 % 64 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 13
5 Mar 5.1 °C 23 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Low 6
6 Mar 6.1 °C 23 % 17 km/h 0.0 mm Low 5
7 Mar 10.5 °C 15 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Low 7
8 Mar 10.6 °C 17 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm Low 8
9 Mar 12.5 °C 18 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Low 9
10 Mar 14.4 °C 16 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Low 9
11 Mar 14.7 °C 16 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
12 Mar 16.2 °C 18 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
13 Mar 20.1 °C 9 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 16
14 Mar 13.4 °C 26 % 72 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
15 Mar 11.8 °C 15 % 68 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
16 Mar 8.1 °C 17 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm High 21
17 Mar 10.1 °C 13 % 58 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
18 Mar 12.3 °C 13 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
19 Mar 15.9 °C 10 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
20 Mar after 16.8 °C 10 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
21 Mar after 16.7 °C 23 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
22 Mar after 16.6 °C 16 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
23 Mar after 14.9 °C 27 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
24 Mar after 16.5 °C 23 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 16
25 Mar after 19.8 °C 16 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
26 Mar after 18.2 °C 19 % 67 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
27 Mar after 19.2 °C 15 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
28 Mar after 23.3 °C 7 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
29 Mar after 24.8 °C 10 % 61 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 15 Feb 2024
After · 26 Mar 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 9 March 2024 the air beside the fire reached 35 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 28: 1.9 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak35 µg/m³
Days over the guideline15 days
PM10101 µg/m³
Optical depth0.83
2021222324252627282912345678910111213141516171819202122
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)

Other fires nearby

All fires in China ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Yiwu County fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 22 February 2024 and 19 March 2024: 27 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 1,096 hectares (11.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Yiwu County (1,098 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 20.1 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 72 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 30, class High.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of China (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: 119 · 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.

Report an error
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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 119.

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. No 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.

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 ADM3 (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.