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Bawlake fire, 5 March 2022 Bawlake

Out · last detection 16 Mar 2022, 07:02 UTC

The fire started on 5 March 2022 in Bawlake, Myanmar, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 3,275 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 98th largest in Kayah since 2016 (of 209 with a page). Number 29 in Myanmar in 2022, of 77.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Bawlake · 2021Shadaw · 2020Mese · 2024Shadaw · 2026

Burnt area
3,275ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
12days
5 Mar 2022 – 16 Mar 2022
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
5 Mar
2022
Heat detections
114
in a single hotspot: 111 MW
Danger at start
26
High · FWI index
Average daily power
62MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 5 Mar16 Mar
16 Mar 2022

How it evolved, day by day

6 Mar 2022 · 2 MW · 2 7 Mar 2022 · 3 MW · 1 10 Mar 2022 · 19 MW · 5 11 Mar 2022 · 11 MW · 7 12 Mar 2022 · 301 MW · 56 13 Mar 2022 · 123 MW · 25 14 Mar 2022 · 31 MW · 9 15 Mar 2022 · 63 MW · 8 16 Mar 2022 · 8 MW · 1
6 Mar 10 Mar 12 Mar 14 Mar 16 Mar

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

The weather it burned in

39°high
37km/h · peak gust
32%lowest humidity

It had gone 18 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 3.0 mm on 21 Mar.

This area had burned before

97% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 647 ha in 2016, 1,773 ha in 2017, 934 ha in 2018, 1,484 ha in 2019, 1,486 ha in 2020, 2,907 ha in 2021. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 3,175 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 2.1% of the area of London (33 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. Bawlake where it started
    3,295 ha reached on 6 Mar
    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 2020
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2020, 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.

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)
10 Mar 37.3 °C 37 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
11 Mar 37.8 °C 36 % 21 km/h 0.1 mm High 27
12 Mar 38.4 °C 32 % 25 km/h 0.1 mm High 28
13 Mar 38.7 °C 32 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
14 Mar 39.1 °C 34 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
15 Mar 38.4 °C 35 % 37 km/h 0.6 mm High 29
16 Mar 37.4 °C 36 % 35 km/h 0.1 mm High 31
17 Mar after 37.2 °C 38 % 32 km/h 0.9 mm High 24
18 Mar after 35.4 °C 40 % 24 km/h 0.6 mm High 23
19 Mar after 37.3 °C 32 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
20 Mar after 36.0 °C 41 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
21 Mar after 33.7 °C 48 % 28 km/h 3.0 mm Low 8

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 26 Feb 2022
After · 23 Mar 2022

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

Detections table · 114Every 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 Myanmar ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Bawlake fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 5 March 2022 to 16 March 2022 (12 days). The perimeter dates it from 10 March 2022 to 16 March 2022.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 3,275 hectares (32.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Bawlake (3,295 ha, 1.7 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 39.1 °C, humidity dropped to 32 % and gusts hit 37 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 31, class High.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Myanmar (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: 10 March 2022 → 5 March 2022.

RSS Changes to this page

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 10 March 2022 to 16 March 2022. 114 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 2020, 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 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (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.