Burned area
satellite only1,346ha
Perimeter published by GWIS (Copernicus).
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus)
- Date
- 4 Nov 2026 – 13 Nov 2026
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page to compare it with.
BF · Burkina Faso · –
Bitou fire, 4 November 2026 Bitou
Dying down · last detection 13 Nov 2026, 13:46 UTC
The fire started on 4 November 2026 in Bitou, Burkina Faso, and satellites saw it burning for 10 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,346 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
Number 250 in Burkina Faso in 2026, of 398.
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 (22.4 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.
Use this data
Compare with…
Use this data
Fire page data · version 2026-11-11matches the official recordwith caveatssatellite onlymodel
When copying, the sentence is
Tick the figures you want: they make up the lede and the CSV.
Duration by satellite
satellite only10days
From 4 Nov 2026 to today: still being detected.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- last detection: 13 Nov 2026, 13:46 UTC
+− cross-check
Satellites pass a few times a day and cloud or smoke can hide the fire: a lack of detections is not an official extinction. Each country’s emergency service declares a fire contained or out.
Start
satellite only4 Nov 2026
First day with fire seen by the satellites or the perimeter.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- 4 Nov 2026
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page, so the alert time and the cause are not known here.
Hotspots
satellite only14
VIIRS detections at 375 m. Most intense hotspot: 22 MW.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (NOAA-20)
- Date
- 4 Nov 2026 – 13 Nov 2026
+− cross-check
There is no official record to compare with. Each hotspot is a pixel detected in one satellite pass, not a separate fire.
The worst day
satellite only69MW
Total radiative power on 5 November 2026; hotspots that day: 7.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (FRP)
- Date
- 5 Nov 2026
+− cross-check
Fire radiative power (FRP) measures the energy the fire gives off when the satellite passes. Added up by day, it compares intensity, not area.
Danger at the start
model18.6FWI · moderate
Fire Weather Index (Canadian system) computed by WorldFires for the day the fire started. Consecutive days without rain before: 21.
- Source
- WorldFires calculation (Canadian FWI system)
- Date
- 4 Nov 2026, local noon
- Model
- ECMWF IFS 0,25° · Open-Meteo.com · provisional
+− cross-check
This is an index computed from weather model data, not a measurement of the fire nor an official warning. Danger warnings are issued by each country’s authority. Emergency number and official warnings
Weather during the fire
model37.4°C · 27% RH
High of 37.4 °C and minimum humidity of 27% on 10 November 2026; gusts of 27 km/h on 10 November 2026.
- Source
- weather model at the fire’s grid cell
- Date
- 4 Nov 2026 – 13 Nov 2026
- Model
- ECMWF IFS 0,25° · Open-Meteo.com · provisional
+− cross-check
These are model values for a cell of about 25 km, not from a weather station: they may differ from what was measured on the ground.
Living inside
model≈ 350people
Estimated residents inside the perimeter and 3.1 ha of built-up area (100 m grid, epoch 2025).
- Source
- GHSL R2023A · JRC
- Date
- calculated on 11 November 2026
+− cross-check
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.
This page’s change log has been kept since 7 November 2026: every night what it publishes is compared and the difference is logged. Anything earlier is reconstructed from each source’s date and marked as reconstructed.
Show
-
· reconstructed weatherWeather and FWI computed from the forecast (provisional until ERA5 arrives)
-
logLast day with fire: 6 November 2026 → 8 November 2026.
-
· reconstructed GHSLPopulation and built-up area computed
-
logArea: 1,229 → 1,346 ha.
-
logPage published (1,229 ha).
Area logged each night
Move the slider to see which area the page published each day.
Versioned permanent link
https://worldfires.org/en/fire/bitou-2026-11-2?v=2026-11-11A version keeps the area, dates, name and official record; the area as it was logged (changes under 2% are not logged). The map, hotspots and weather always show today’s data.
Citation
A lede of about 60 words figures only, no adjectives
CSV for this fire bitou-2026-11-2.csv · daily, no individual hotspots
| fecha | focos_viirs | frp_mw | tmax_c | tmin_c | hr_min_pct | viento_max_kmh | racha_max_kmh | precip_mm | fwi | clase_fwi | dentro_del_incendio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-11-04 | 1 | 3 | 35.5 | 25 | 39 | 9.7 | 19.4 | 0 | 18.6 | moderado | 1 |
| 2026-11-05 | 7 | 69 | 36.9 | 23.6 | 33 | 9.4 | 19.1 | 0 | 20.1 | moderado | 1 |
| 2026-11-06 | 0 | 0 | 36.7 | 21.9 | 30 | 10.3 | 23.4 | 0 | 23.8 | alto | 1 |
| 2026-11-07 | 0 | 0 | 36 | 23.3 | 32 | 9 | 23 | 0 | 26.1 | alto | 1 |
| 2026-11-08 | 2 | 17 | 36.5 | 24.9 | 30 | 8.3 | 21.2 | 0 | 26.8 | alto | 1 |
| 2026-11-09 | 0 | 0 | 36.3 | 24.9 | 30 | 8.5 | 25.2 | 0 | 28.2 | alto | 1 |
| 2026-11-10 | 0 | 0 | 37.4 | 24.6 | 27 | 13.5 | 27 | 0 | 26.8 | alto | 1 |
| 2026-11-11 | 0 | 0 | 35.2 | 24.9 | 35 | 17 | 25.9 | 0 | 30.2 | alto | 1 |
| 2026-11-12 | 1 | 4 | 35.6 | 23.7 | 27 | 10.7 | 24.5 | 0.1 | 29.6 | alto | 1 |
| 2026-11-13 | 3 | 22 | 34.8 | 24.9 | 34 | 10.8 | 25.2 | 0.2 | 31.2 | alto | 1 |
It is generated in your browser from this page’s data: one file per fire, aggregated by day and without individual hotspots.
Live widget for your story
It updates itself while the fire is still active and links to this page. Free, with the attribution shown at the bottom.
Sources for this page: GWIS (Copernicus), NASA FIRMS (VIIRS), ECMWF IFS · Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0), GHSL (JRC). Open-Meteo.com · How we build fire pages: methodology
Is it still active?
No detections since 13 Nov 2026, 13:46 UTC. That usually means no flame is visible from space any more, although hotspots may remain. Satellites pass a few times a day and cloud or smoke can hide the fire: a lack of detections is not an official extinction. Each country’s emergency service declares a fire contained or out.
- Burnt area
- 1,346ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 10days
- 4 Nov 2026 – 13 Nov 2026
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- communes
- Started on
- 4 Nov
- 2026
- Heat detections
- 14
- in a single hotspot: 22 MW
- Danger at start
- 19
- Moderate · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 23MW
- detected power per day, on average
The next 72 hours
The wind is blowing from the north-east and pushing to the south-west; no sharp shifts are expected until Tue 17, 02:00.
ECMWF IFS 0.25° at the centre of the fire · computed 14 Nov 2026, 02:56 UTC
Sat 14, 20:00 – Sun 15, 07:00, local time
No overnight recovery: humidity stays at or below 45 %
Nights usually moisten the vegetation and the fire calms down. Tonight humidity does not reach 55 %, so it may stay active in the small hours.
Sun 15, 20:00 – Mon 16, 07:00, local time
No overnight recovery: humidity stays at or below 49 %
Nights usually moisten the vegetation and the fire calms down. Tonight humidity does not reach 55 %, so it may stay active in the small hours.
Checked, no warning: no wind shifts of more than 60° no useful rain expected (0.0 mm in 72 h)
Hour by hour, local time
Tap the strip to see each hour
Mean wind
Gusts
where it blows to
Relative humidity
Night (8 pm to 8 am)
Rain (mm) · chance in %
Where is it blowing? The next 48 h
geoBoundaries/OpenStreetMap, Wambacher (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0); geoBoundaries/USAID Ghana HPNO, Ghana Statistical Service (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)); OCHA COD-AB/Institut Geographique Burkina (IGB) (Creative Commons Attribution for Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY-IGO))
At this hour
Places the fan reaches
Is it heading my way?
We compare your point with the fan for each hour. Your location never leaves your device.
or tap the mapThis is not an official warning. It is a global model forecast with cells of about 25 km, at the centre of the fire: it cannot see valley winds or the winds the fire itself creates. The fan shows where the wind blows, not where the fire will spread. If in doubt, follow what the authorities say.
Forecast: ECMWF IFS 0.25° (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts), served by our own Open-Meteo instance; the chance of rain comes from the ECMWF ensemble. Variables: wind and gusts at 10 m, wind at 850 hPa, relative humidity and temperature at 2 m, rain. Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0).
Fire: GWIS / Copernicus (reconstructed from VIIRS) (CC BY 4.0); hotspots from the last 24 h: VIIRS from NASA FIRMS. Boundaries: geoBoundaries/OpenStreetMap, Wambacher (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0); geoBoundaries/USAID Ghana HPNO, Ghana Statistical Service (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)); OCHA COD-AB/Institut Geographique Burkina (IGB) (Creative Commons Attribution for Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY-IGO)).
How it is worked out: wind shift = a change of more than 60° in 6 h or less, with at least 15 km/h before and after; no overnight recovery = peak humidity between 8 pm and 8 am stays below 55 %; useful rain = 2 mm or more in 6 h. The fan opens 18° plus however much the wind varies within ±3 h and reaches 25 km beyond the edge of the fire: one model cell, not a rate of spread. Methodology
Where it burned
HOTSPOTS BY DAY
4 Nov13 Nov
13 Nov 2026
How it evolved, day by day
5 Nov
11 Nov
13 Nov
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
37°high
27km/h · peak gust
27%lowest humidity
It had gone 21 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.
This area had burned before
57% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 121 ha in 2024, 745 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 764 ha that had burned before.
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
-
Bitou where it started1,354 ha reached on 4 Nov1.1 %
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 2025Built-up area3.1 ha
Residents≈ 350
Inside the perimeter there were about 3.1 hectares of built-up land and about 350 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) · forecast models, provisional until the ERA5 reanalysis arrives
| Day | High | Min. humidity | Peak gust | Rain | Danger (FWI) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 Nov | 35.5 °C | 39 % | 19 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 19 |
| 5 Nov | 36.9 °C | 33 % | 19 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 20 |
| 6 Nov | 36.7 °C | 30 % | 23 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 24 |
| 7 Nov | 36.0 °C | 32 % | 23 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 26 |
| 8 Nov | 36.5 °C | 30 % | 21 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 27 |
| 9 Nov | 36.3 °C | 30 % | 25 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 28 |
| 10 Nov | 37.4 °C | 27 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 27 |
| 11 Nov | 35.2 °C | 35 % | 26 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 30 |
| 12 Nov | 35.6 °C | 27 % | 24 km/h | 0.1 mm | High 30 |
| 13 Nov | 34.8 °C | 34 % | 25 km/h | 0.2 mm | High 31 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
↔
Before · 28 Oct 2026
After · 13 Nov 2026
Sentinel-2 did not pass over on that day. Try another date, or use false colour, which is daily.
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 5 November 2026 the air beside the fire reached 54 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 27: 1.8 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
PM2.5 peak54 µg/m³
Days over the guideline3 days
PM1084 µg/m³
Optical depth0.48
WHO 15
23456
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 · 14Every 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 time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Bitou fire last?
- According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 4 November 2026 to 13 November 2026 (10 days). The perimeter dates it from 5 November 2026 to 8 November 2026.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 1,346 hectares (13.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Bitou (1,354 ha, 1.1 %).
- Is the Bitou fire still active?
- No fire detections since 13 Nov 2026, 13:46 UTC. A lack of detections is not an official extinction.
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 37.4 °C, humidity dropped to 27 % and gusts hit 27 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 31, class High.
- What weather is expected at the fire over the next 72 hours?
- The wind is blowing from the north-east and pushing to the south-west; no sharp shifts are expected until Tue 17, 02:00. No overnight recovery: humidity stays at or below 45 % (Sat 14, 20:00 – Sun 15, 07:00). No overnight recovery: humidity stays at or below 49 % (Sun 15, 20:00 – Mon 16, 07:00). Times are local time at the fire. ECMWF IFS forecast (Open-Meteo) computed 14 Nov 2026, 02:56 UTC; this is not an official warning.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Burkina Faso (OCHA COD-AB). 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 · 3 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 7 November 2026.
- Last day with fire: 6 November 2026 → 8 November 2026.
- Area: 1,229 → 1,346 ha.
- Page published (1,229 ha).
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.
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 5 November 2026 to 8 November 2026. 14 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
- We have not matched this page with any official record.
- Weather: ECMWF IFS model, provisional until the ERA5 reanalysis arrives.
- 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.
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 OCHA COD-AB (Institut Geographique Burkina (IGB)) (Creative Commons Attribution for Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY-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.