Burned area
satellite only1,696ha
Perimeter published by GWIS (Copernicus).
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus)
- Date
- 15 Mar 2025 – 17 Mar 2025
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page to compare it with.
CN · China · –
Zhenlai County fire, 15 March 2025 镇赉县 · Tailai County, Zhenlai County
Out · last detection 17 Mar 2025, 04:19 UTC
The fire started on 15 March 2025 in Zhenlai County, China, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,696 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.
It is the 145th largest in Jilin Province since 2016 (of 395 with a page). Number 55 in China in 2025, of 131.
The power measured by the satellite is low (15.4 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.
Use this data
Compare with…
Use this data
Fire page data · version 2026-11-15matches 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 only3days
15 Mar 2025 to 17 Mar 2025: first and last day with fire on the page.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- last detection: 17 Mar 2025, 04:19 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 only15 Mar 2025
First day with fire seen by the satellites or the perimeter.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- 15 Mar 2025
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page, so the alert time and the cause are not known here.
Hotspots
satellite only66
VIIRS detections at 375 m. Most intense hotspot: 15 MW.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (Suomi NPP)
- Date
- 15 Mar 2025 – 17 Mar 2025
+− 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 only205MW
Total radiative power on 16 March 2025; hotspots that day: 42.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (FRP)
- Date
- 16 Mar 2025
+− 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
model4.4FWI · very low
Fire Weather Index (Canadian system) computed by WorldFires for the day the fire started. Consecutive days without rain before: 3.
- Source
- WorldFires calculation (Canadian FWI system)
- Date
- 15 Mar 2025, 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
model1.0°C · 20% RH
High of 1.0 °C and minimum humidity of 20% on 15 March 2025; gusts of 39 km/h on 15 March 2025.
- Source
- weather model at the fire’s grid cell
- Date
- 15 Mar 2025 – 17 Mar 2025
- 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.
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
-
logName: Tailai County → Zhenlai County.
-
· reconstructed weatherWeather and FWI computed from the ERA5 reanalysis
-
logStart date: 16 March 2025 → 15 March 2025.
Area logged each night
Move the slider to see which area the page published each day.
Versioned permanent link
https://worldfires.org/en/fire/zhenlai-county-2025-03-6?v=2026-11-15A 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 zhenlai-county-2025-03-6.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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-03-15 | 1 | 4 | 1 | -7.2 | 20 | 18.6 | 38.9 | 0 | 4.4 | muy_bajo | 1 |
| 2025-03-16 | 42 | 205 | 0.1 | -9.1 | 22 | 13.6 | 28.1 | 0 | 3.2 | muy_bajo | 1 |
| 2025-03-17 | 23 | 115 | -0.1 | -7.6 | 30 | 17.2 | 36.4 | 0 | 5 | muy_bajo | 1 |
| 2025-03-18 | 0 | 0 | 3.2 | -8.8 | 24 | 13.6 | 25.6 | 0 | 3.6 | muy_bajo | 0 |
| 2025-03-19 | 0 | 0 | 10.8 | -4.5 | 24 | 16.1 | 30.2 | 0 | 5.2 | bajo | 0 |
| 2025-03-20 | 0 | 0 | 15.9 | -0.1 | 20 | 23.3 | 45.7 | 0 | 7.6 | bajo | 0 |
| 2025-03-21 | 0 | 0 | 17.6 | 1.9 | 25 | 26.2 | 52.2 | 0.1 | 12.4 | moderado | 0 |
| 2025-03-22 | 0 | 0 | 5.7 | -0.6 | 33 | 14.7 | 30.2 | 0 | 7.6 | bajo | 0 |
| 2025-03-23 | 0 | 0 | 13.7 | -2 | 26 | 26 | 49.7 | 0 | 12.5 | moderado | 0 |
| 2025-03-24 | 0 | 0 | 8 | 0.5 | 17 | 31.7 | 51.1 | 0 | 12.8 | moderado | 0 |
| 2025-03-25 | 0 | 0 | 4 | -2.4 | 43 | 18.3 | 34.2 | 0.9 | 4 | muy_bajo | 0 |
| 2025-03-26 | 0 | 0 | 2.1 | -2.9 | 64 | 22.6 | 46.1 | 2.3 | 4.5 | muy_bajo | 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). Open-Meteo.com · How we build fire pages: methodology
- Burnt area
- 1,696ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 3days
- 15 Mar 2025 – 17 Mar 2025
- Municipalities hit
- 2
- counties
- Started on
- 15 Mar
- 2025
- Heat detections
- 66
- in a single hotspot: 15 MW
- Danger at start
- 4
- Very low · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 108MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
HOTSPOTS BY DAY
15 Mar17 Mar
17 Mar 2025
How it evolved, day by day
15 Mar
16 Mar
17 Mar
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
1°high
39km/h · peak gust
20%lowest humidity
It had gone 3 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.3 mm on 26 Mar.
This area had burned before
72% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 138 ha in 2016, 85 ha in 2019, 1,119 ha in 2020, 429 ha in 2021, 100 ha in 2022, 298 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,220 ha that had burned before.
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Beijing (Dongcheng and Xicheng) boundary: geoBoundaries · Lee Beryman, OpenStreetMap · © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 1.0).
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).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
Tailai County 泰来县1,683 ha0.4 %
-
0 ha0.0 %
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.
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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15 Mar | 1.0 °C | 20 % | 39 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very low 4 |
| 16 Mar | 0.1 °C | 22 % | 28 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very low 3 |
| 17 Mar | -0.1 °C | 30 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very low 5 |
| 18 Mar after | 3.2 °C | 24 % | 26 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very low 4 |
| 19 Mar after | 10.8 °C | 24 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 5 |
| 20 Mar after | 15.9 °C | 20 % | 46 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 8 |
| 21 Mar after | 17.6 °C | 25 % | 52 km/h | 0.1 mm | Moderate 12 |
| 22 Mar after | 5.7 °C | 33 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 8 |
| 23 Mar after | 13.7 °C | 26 % | 50 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 12 |
| 24 Mar after | 8.0 °C | 17 % | 51 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 13 |
| 25 Mar after | 4.0 °C | 43 % | 34 km/h | 0.9 mm | Very low 4 |
| 26 Mar after | 2.1 °C | 64 % | 46 km/h | 2.3 mm | Very low 4 |
Its twins: fires that started in the same weather
It started with an FWI of 4.4, a minimum humidity of 20% and 3 days without rain. Fires in the area that started in weather like this since 2016: 20.
FWI at the start
4.4
Minimum humidity
20 %
Days without rain
3
this fire
chosen twins
rest of the area
Almost identicalSimilar
Outlines of the closest twins
This fire · Zhenlai County fire, 15 March 2025
1,696 ha
3 days
FWI 4.4
Min. humidity 20 %
Zhenlai County fire, March 2018
1,433 ha
9 days
FWI 4.5
Min. humidity 20 %
14 km away, in 2018
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
Zhenlai County fire, March 2018
1,321 ha
8 days
FWI 4.2
Min. humidity 21 %
19 km away, in 2018
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
Tailai County fire, March 2017
3,226 ha
12 days
FWI 5.0
Min. humidity 21 %
49 km away, in 2017
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
Zhenlai County fire, March 2018
1,656 ha
5 days
FWI 4.3
Min. humidity 19 %
30 km away, in 2018
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
Zhenlai County fire, March 2016
10,618 ha
13 days
FWI 0.7
Min. humidity 21 %
17 km away, in 2016
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
What happened to them
- 8 days
- median duration
- 1,481 ha
- median area
- 100 %
- went past 1,000 ha
- 3.4 mm
- rain at the end (median; 10 of 20 had it)
It burned an area similar to its twins (1,696 ha against a median of 1,481 ha) and lasted 3 days, against 8 days.
In 10 of 20, not even 1 mm fell in the ten days after the end: they went out without rain. In the rest, the first rainy day brought a median of 3.4 mm.
This is a bank of analogues: it shows what usually happens, not what will happen. With fewer than 15 twins we give no figures. How we calculate it
How it ended
2.3 mmfirst rain
26 Mar9 days after it ended
39km/h · max. gust
It was considered over on 17 Mar, and on 26 Mar 2.3 mm fell. We do not know whether the rain or the firefighters put it out. Twins with rain when they ended: 10 of 20, with a median of 3.4 mm.
Weather on this page: Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)
How a twin is chosen
- Same area: fires that have already ended, less than 250 km from this one, since 2016.
- Same start: we compare the FWI on the first day, the minimum humidity that day and the run of days without rain before it. The slider sets how much they may differ.
- Only pages with final weather data (ERA5 reanalysis) calculated in the same way as this fire’s; agricultural and grass burns and pages with data under review are left out.
- Fires burning at the same time as this one (a week before or after) are left out: they share the same spell of weather and do not count as a precedent.
- They are sorted by similarity, and the outlines of the first five are drawn.
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
↔
Before · 8 Mar 2025
After · 24 Mar 2025
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 17 March 2025 the air beside the fire reached 34 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 22: 1.5 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
PM2.5 peak34 µg/m³
Days over the guideline6 days
PM1036 µg/m³
Optical depth0.68
WHO 15
14 Mar16 Mar18 Mar20 Mar
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 · 66Every 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
- 11,601 haTailai County 泰来县25 October 2026 · 10 days · 10 km away
- 28,418 haZhenlai County 镇赉县11 November 2025 · 13 days · 15 km away
- 16,883 haZhenlai County 镇赉县14 March 2025 · 11 days · 17 km away
- 10,618 haZhenlai County 镇赉县7 March 2016 · 13 days · 17 km away
- 15,408 haZhenlai County 镇赉县9 March 2026 · 19 days · 18 km away
- 19,594 haZhenlai County 镇赉县12 March 2024 · 4 days · 19 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Zhenlai County fire last?
- According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 15 March 2025 to 17 March 2025 (3 days). The perimeter dates it from 16 March 2025 to 17 March 2025.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 1,696 hectares (17.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 2 municipalities: Tailai County (1,683 ha, 0.4 %); Zhenlai County (0 ha, 0.0 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 1.0 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 39 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 5, class Very low.
- 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.
- How did the fires that started in similar weather in this area end?
- Fires less than 250 km away that started since 2016 with a similar FWI, humidity and dry spell: 20. Their median duration was 8 days and their median area 1,481 ha; 100 % went past 1,000 ha. In 10 of 20, not even 1 mm fell in the ten days after the end: they went out without rain. In the rest, the first rainy day brought a median of 3.4 mm.
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 · 2 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
- Name: Tailai County → Zhenlai County.
- Start date: 16 March 2025 → 15 March 2025.
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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 16 March 2025 to 17 March 2025. 66 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.
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.