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NG · Nigeria · –

Abadam fire, 13 October 2025 Abadam

Out · last detection 17 Oct 2025, 12:27 UTC

The fire started on 13 October 2025 in Abadam, Nigeria, and satellites saw it burning for 5 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 3,640 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 86 in Nigeria in 2025, of 227.

GWIS near-real-time perimeter, from the layer that changed in August 2025: this fire is not compared with fires from earlier years, because since then the GWIS layer gives more and larger perimeters.

The power measured by the satellite is low (25.8 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Abadam · 2024Kukawa · 2018

Burnt area
3,640ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
5days
13 Oct 2025 – 17 Oct 2025
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
13 Oct
2025
Heat detections
105
in a single hotspot: 26 MW
Danger at start
40
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
171MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 13 Oct17 Oct
17 Oct 2025

How it evolved, day by day

14 Oct 2025 · 128 MW · 28 15 Oct 2025 · 200 MW · 40 16 Oct 2025 · 328 MW · 31 17 Oct 2025 · 27 MW · 6
14 Oct 15 Oct 16 Oct 17 Oct

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

38°high
32km/h · peak gust
15%lowest humidity

It had gone 17 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

32% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 775 ha in 2020, 364 ha in 2022, 102 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,167 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 2.3% of the area of London (36 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. Abadam where it started
    3,664 ha reached on 14 Oct
    0.9 %

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 area< 0.1 ha
Residents≈ 30

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.09 hectares of built-up land and about 30 residents (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)
13 Oct 38.2 °C 18 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
14 Oct 38.0 °C 15 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
15 Oct 38.2 °C 16 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
16 Oct 37.9 °C 16 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
17 Oct 37.6 °C 16 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
18 Oct after 38.2 °C 14 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
19 Oct after 39.7 °C 15 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
20 Oct after 39.6 °C 14 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
21 Oct after 40.0 °C 13 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
22 Oct after 40.4 °C 9 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
23 Oct after 40.7 °C 6 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
24 Oct after 40.3 °C 9 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
25 Oct after 40.0 °C 12 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
26 Oct after 39.8 °C 12 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
27 Oct after 39.0 °C 13 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 64

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 6 Oct 2025
After · 24 Oct 2025

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 13 October 2025 the air beside the fire reached 52 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 39: 2.6 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak52 µg/m³
Days over the guideline10 days
PM10258 µg/m³
Optical depth0.52
11 Oct13 Oct15 Oct17 Oct19 Oct
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 · 105Every 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 timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Nigeria

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Abadam fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 13 October 2025 and 17 October 2025: 5 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 3,640 hectares (36.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Abadam (3,664 ha, 0.9 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 38.2 °C, humidity dropped to 15 % and gusts hit 32 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 45, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Nigeria (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: 112 · 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.

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
What do you think is wrong?

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 112.

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. 105 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 ADM2 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)). 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.