Aursee · fire file
Fire near Shakawe, Botswana, 10 October 2026

What the satellites saw
Every pixel VIIRS returned inside 11 km of this fire: 6 in daylight, 3 on the night pass. A pixel is 375 m, so the squares are drawn at the size the measurement has.
Where
- Active fire
421 - Burned before
417 - Lightning first
none here - Near a road
194
Coastline and borders from Natural Earth at 110 m — regional context, not a survey. Each layer above is its own address, so a view can be shared.
A fire was first detected here at 11:38 UTC on 10 October 2026, 70 km SSW of Shakawe in North-West, Botswana. At its most recent pass it was putting out 95 megawatts of radiative power across 9 separate satellite detections.
The detections span about 6.8 km of ground.
No settlement in our index has population recorded within 25 km.
When the satellite first saw it
In local solar time the first detection falls at 13:04, which is the early afternoon. VIIRS passes about 01:30 and 13:30 local solar, so this is when the satellite looked: the fire began somewhere in the twelve hours before.
It was seen across 12.1 hours of satellite passes.
33% of the detections came from the night pass.
What this ground has done before
This ground has burned before. Our archive records fire here in 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2023, 2024, 2026, across 18 days, most recently on 2026-10-09.
Wind and weather
At the fire, wind was 18 km/h from the ENE, carrying smoke and embers towards the WSW. Temperature 35°C, relative humidity 21%.
Where analysis would go
Our screening pass scores this fire 0.85. The score ranks where analysis is worth spending.
What the screen noticed: 6 distinct events; activity compressed 14x versus a week-long release; 50% of events first seen at night (local solar), when machinery is not working; events spread over 4 km - too far apart to be one fire, close enough to share an actor.
Read from satellite detections and weather. No roads, no land cover, no ground visit.
What else this page knows
Each of these is attached to every fire, including this one.



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A detection is a heat signature at 375 m, about three hours behind the satellite. Cloud, smoke and canopy hide fires; each satellite passes twice a day. Not for evacuation or life-safety decisions — follow your local fire service.
Written from our own measurements; composed. Open this fire on the live map.