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ET · Ethiopia · –

Agalometi fire, 24 January 2026 Agalometi, Kamashi

Out · last detection 31 Jan 2026, 23:35 UTC

The fire started on 24 January 2026 in Agalometi, Ethiopia, and satellites saw it burning for 8 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 8,926 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

Number 12 in Ethiopia in 2026, of 201.

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.

Burnt area
8,926ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
8days
24 Jan 2026 – 31 Jan 2026
Municipalities hit
2
districts
Started on
24 Jan
2026
Heat detections
231
in a single hotspot: 106 MW
Danger at start
45
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
288MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 24 Jan31 Jan
31 Jan 2026

How it evolved, day by day

24 Jan 2026 · 4 MW · 3 25 Jan 2026 · 286 MW · 24 26 Jan 2026 · 690 MW · 34 27 Jan 2026 · 86 MW · 19 28 Jan 2026 · 447 MW · 68 29 Jan 2026 · 330 MW · 41 30 Jan 2026 · 79 MW · 10 31 Jan 2026 · 381 MW · 32
24 Jan 26 Jan 28 Jan 30 Jan

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

The weather it burned in

36°high
35km/h · peak gust
9%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

98% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 6,262 ha in 2016, 4,044 ha in 2017, 942 ha in 2018, 5,997 ha in 2019, 2,188 ha in 2020, 3,219 ha in 2021, 3,499 ha in 2022, 515 ha in 2023, 398 ha in 2024, 2,293 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 8,777 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 5.6% of the area of London (89 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. Agalometi where it started
    6,542 ha reached on 24 Jan
    3.7 %
  2. 2,441 ha reached on 25 Jan
    1.7 %

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 area0.43 ha
Residents≈ 400

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.43 hectares of built-up land and about 400 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)

Started with Very dry air: 26 % of the area in Ethiopia 60 days without rain: 37 % of the area in Ethiopia

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
24 Jan 35.8 °C 13 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
25 Jan 36.2 °C 9 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
26 Jan 35.7 °C 10 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
27 Jan 35.6 °C 12 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
28 Jan 35.7 °C 11 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
29 Jan 34.7 °C 13 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
30 Jan 36.0 °C 16 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
31 Jan 36.1 °C 18 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
1 Feb after 36.0 °C 11 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
2 Feb after 34.1 °C 20 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
3 Feb after 35.6 °C 19 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
4 Feb after 35.3 °C 19 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
5 Feb after 34.1 °C 17 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
6 Feb after 35.7 °C 19 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
7 Feb after 35.5 °C 12 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
8 Feb after 36.5 °C 12 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
9 Feb after 35.6 °C 19 % 26 km/h 0.1 mm Very high 44
10 Feb after 37.3 °C 12 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 17 Jan 2026
After · 7 Feb 2026

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 30 January 2026 the air beside the fire reached 118 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 84: 5.6 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak118 µg/m³
Days over the guideline12 days
PM10122 µg/m³
Optical depth0.95
23 Jan26 Jan29 Jan1 Feb
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 · 231Every 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 Ethiopia

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Agalometi fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 24 January 2026 to 31 January 2026 (8 days). The perimeter dates it from 25 January 2026 to 31 January 2026.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 8,926 hectares (89.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Agalometi (6,542 ha, 3.7 %); Kamashi (2,441 ha, 1.7 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 36.2 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 35 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 55, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Ethiopia (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.

Satellite cross-check

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Start date: 25 January 2026 → 24 January 2026.

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.

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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 25 January 2026 to 31 January 2026. 231 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 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.