2026 fire season — what did the satellite see?

Heat detections recorded over Türkiye by the NASA FIRMS satellites between 1 May and 18 October, compared with the same period of the past five seasons. Permanent heat sources (refineries, steel plants, power stations) are excluded from these figures.

How the season is going

Totals by season

• 202152,885
• 202222,388
• 202344,549
• 202459,702
• 202540,815
• 202640,091

The 2026 season is counted up to 18 October; the other years are clipped to the same calendar window (1 May – 18 October), which is what makes the comparison fair.

By province

This table counts the same thing for every province: the heat detections the satellite saw there. Fixed industrial sources are removed; what remains contains both forest fires and stubble fires on agricultural land, and the two are not separated from each other. A high number can mean many forest fires or a lot of farmland — which one it is follows from that province's land cover.

Let us also say this plainly: burning stubble is illegal, and rightly so. The fire kills what lives in the soil rather than merely clearing its surface, costs the field its own fertility for years, and sends smoke into the lungs of the nearest settlement; when the wind picks up it does not stay in the field either — it crosses into the forest at its edge. In a country whose summers run dry, whose winds run hard and whose forests grow back slowly, keeping this habit alive is a serious disgrace against nature.

What these numbers are not

• Not a count of fires. A single fire lasting days produces hundreds of detections; a small, short-lived fire may not show up at all.
• Not burnt area. There is no fixed ratio between detection counts and hectares.
• Incomplete. Fires under cloud, moving beneath the canopy, or dying out between two satellite passes never enter the record.
• Mixed sources. The current season comes from the near-real-time feed, past seasons from the reprocessed archive. There is no day where the two overlap, so we could not measure the difference; the comparison is approximate.
• The source set is deliberately fixed (Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20). Including NOAA-21 would make the 2021–2022 seasons look artificially low.

Data: NASA FIRMS (VIIRS 375 m). This page is generated automatically from satellite records and updates as the season goes on; it is not an official statistic.