AURSEEAursee · fire file
Fire near Tabubil, Papua New Guinea, 11 October 2026
What the satellites saw
Every pixel VIIRS returned inside 6 km of this fire: 2 in daylight, 0 on the night pass. A pixel is 375 m, so the squares are drawn at the size the measurement has.
Where
- Active fire
1140 - Burned before
983 - Lightning first
none here - Near a road
409
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 03:51 UTC on 11 October 2026, 46 km ENE of Tabubil in Western Province, Papua New Guinea. At its most recent pass it was putting out 15 megawatts of radiative power across 2 separate satellite detections.
The detections sit inside a single kilometre 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 13:17, 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.
The fire was caught on a single satellite pass, so we can say when it was first seen but not how long it burned.
What this ground has done before
This ground has burned before. Our archive records fire here in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2026, across 15 days, most recently on 2026-09-15.
Wind and weather
At the fire, wind was 5 km/h from the NNW, carrying smoke and embers towards the SSE. Temperature 34°C, relative humidity 55%.
Twelve hours on, the forecast has wind at 1 km/h from the SSW. These are model figures at roughly 10 km resolution, not a reading taken at the fire.
Where analysis would go
Our screening pass scores this fire 0.95. The score ranks where analysis is worth spending.
What the screen noticed: 12 distinct events in one space-time group; activity compressed 13x versus a week-long release; 50% of events first seen at night (local solar), when machinery is not working; events spread over 10 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
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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.