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MG · Madagascar · –

Antsohihy fire, 4 September 2026 Antsohihy, Analalava

Out · last detection 16 Sept 2026, 22:31 UTC

The fire started on 4 September 2026 in Antsohihy, Madagascar, and satellites saw it burning for 13 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,225 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

Number 11 in Madagascar in 2026, of 110.

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.

Compare with…
Burnt area
5,225ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
13days
4 Sept 2026 – 16 Sept 2026
Municipalities hit
2
districts
Started on
4 Sept
2026
Heat detections
163
in a single hotspot: 95 MW
Danger at start
39
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
184MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 4 Sept16 Sept
16 Sept 2026

How it evolved, day by day

4 Sept 2026 · 1 MW · 1 5 Sept 2026 · 17 MW · 5 6 Sept 2026 · 245 MW · 18 7 Sept 2026 · 1 MW · 1 8 Sept 2026 · 119 MW · 14 9 Sept 2026 · 887 MW · 54 10 Sept 2026 · 1,007 MW · 45 11 Sept 2026 · 6 MW · 4 12 Sept 2026 · 11 MW · 2 13 Sept 2026 · 11 MW · 1 14 Sept 2026 · 4 MW · 1 15 Sept 2026 · 2 MW · 2 16 Sept 2026 · 82 MW · 15
4 Sept 7 Sept 10 Sept 13 Sept 16 Sept

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

The weather it burned in

33°high
62km/h · peak gust
28%lowest humidity

It had gone 19 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

33% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 5 ha in 2016, 11 ha in 2017, 232 ha in 2018, 1,014 ha in 2019, 352 ha in 2021, 825 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,711 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 3.3% of the area of London (52 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. Antsohihy where it started
    4,211 ha reached on 4 Sept
    0.9 %
  2. 1,049 ha reached on 6 Sept
    0.1 %

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 area2.4 ha
Residents≈ 1,000

Inside the perimeter there were about 2.4 hectares of built-up land and about 1,000 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)
4 Sept 31.4 °C 32 % 41 km/h 0.3 mm Very high 39
5 Sept 31.8 °C 32 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
6 Sept 30.6 °C 31 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
7 Sept 31.0 °C 36 % 28 km/h 0.7 mm High 30
8 Sept 32.3 °C 31 % 56 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
9 Sept 32.8 °C 31 % 59 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
10 Sept 32.3 °C 31 % 57 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
11 Sept 32.1 °C 30 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
12 Sept 31.6 °C 31 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
13 Sept 31.4 °C 30 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
14 Sept 32.7 °C 28 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
15 Sept 32.3 °C 28 % 59 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
16 Sept 31.2 °C 31 % 62 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
17 Sept after 31.5 °C 30 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
18 Sept after 32.4 °C 31 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
19 Sept after 32.6 °C 27 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
20 Sept after 32.2 °C 34 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
21 Sept after 31.7 °C 31 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
22 Sept after 32.6 °C 35 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
23 Sept after 31.4 °C 37 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
24 Sept after 32.3 °C 36 % 38 km/h 0.1 mm Very high 39
25 Sept after 32.6 °C 32 % 31 km/h 0.1 mm High 36
26 Sept after 32.8 °C 30 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 38

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 28 Aug 2026
After · 23 Sept 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 18 September 2026 the air beside the fire reached 16 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak16 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1019 µg/m³
Optical depth0.32
2 Sept6 Sept10 Sept14 Sept18 Sept
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 · 163Every 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 Madagascar

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Antsohihy fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 4 September 2026 to 16 September 2026 (13 days). The perimeter dates it from 4 September 2026 to 11 September 2026.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 5,225 hectares (52.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Antsohihy (4,211 ha, 0.9 %); Analalava (1,049 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 32.8 °C, humidity dropped to 28 % and gusts hit 62 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 56, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Madagascar (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 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.

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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 4 September 2026 to 11 September 2026. 163 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 3.0 Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY 3.0 IGO)). 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.