Bassar fire, November 2024 Bassar
The fire started on 25 November 2024 in Bassar, Togo, and satellites saw it burning for 14 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,036 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 14th largest in Kara since 2016 (of 107 with a page). Number 6 in Togo in 2024, of 25.
Compare with…
Suggestions: Bassar · 2019Bassar · 2016Bassar · 2020Bassar · 2017
- Burnt area
- 2,036ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 14days
- 25 Nov 2024 – 8 Dec 2024
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- prefectures
- Started on
- 25 Nov
- 2024
- Heat detections
- 78
- in a single hotspot: 36 MW
- Average daily power
- 64MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
This area had burned before
92% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 829 ha in 2016, 625 ha in 2017, 527 ha in 2018, 1,235 ha in 2019, 1,340 ha in 2020, 106 ha in 2021, 247 ha in 2022. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,879 ha that had burned before.
- 884 ha Bassar fire, December 2019 1,595 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 829 ha Bassar fire, December 2016 6,703 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 795 ha Bassar fire, December 2020 1,421 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 625 ha Bassar fire, December 2017 1,678 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 527 ha Bassar fire, December 2018 1,188 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 419 ha Bassar fire, December 2020 1,524 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 247 ha Bassar fire, December 2022 1,393 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 229 ha Bassar fire, December 2019 1,410 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
Bassar where it started2,048 ha reached on 26 Nov0.6 %
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.
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
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 · CopernicusOn 8 December 2024 the air beside the fire reached 114 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 65: 4.3 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
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 · 78Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 6,703 haBassar15 December 2016 · 17 days · 5 km away
- 3,236 haBassar17 December 2021 · 17 days · 5 km away
- 36,837 haSotouboua26 November 2025 · 46 days · 10 km away
- 4,783 haBassar10 December 2021 · 18 days · 11 km away
- 3,563 haSotouboua12 December 2021 · 20 days · 25 km away
- 4,570 haSotouboua6 December 2022 · 15 days · 28 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Bassar fire last?
- According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 25 November 2024 to 8 December 2024 (14 days). The perimeter dates it from 2 December 2024 to 5 December 2024.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 2,036 hectares (20.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Bassar (2,048 ha, 0.6 %).
- Where does this data come from?
- From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Togo (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.
No changes 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
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 2 December 2024 to 5 December 2024. 78 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
- We have not matched this page with any official record.
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-ShareAlike 2.0). 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.