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Bogal fire, February 2022 Bogal, Diaroumé

Out · last detection 14 Feb 2022, 14:49 UTC

The fire started on 5 February 2022 in Bogal, Senegal, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,806 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 10th largest in Sédhiou since 2016 (of 86 with a page). Number 11 in Senegal in 2022, of 90.

Compare with…
Burnt area
6,806ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
9days
5 Feb 2022 – 13 Feb 2022
Municipalities hit
2
districts
Started on
5 Feb
2022
Heat detections
343
in a single hotspot: 65 MW
Danger at start
50
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
314MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 5 Feb13 Feb
14 Feb 2022

How it evolved, day by day

5 Feb 2022 · 82 MW · 9 6 Feb 2022 · 476 MW · 28 7 Feb 2022 · 14 MW · 7 8 Feb 2022 · 902 MW · 46 9 Feb 2022 · 377 MW · 30 10 Feb 2022 · 574 MW · 91 11 Feb 2022 · 521 MW · 60 12 Feb 2022 · 102 MW · 23 13 Feb 2022 · 63 MW · 15 14 Feb 2022 · 27 MW · 5
5 Feb 7 Feb 8 Feb 9 Feb 11 Feb 13 Feb

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

The weather it burned in

40°high
48km/h · peak gust
11%lowest humidity

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

This area had burned before

81% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,770 ha in 2016, 543 ha in 2017, 77 ha in 2018, 3,008 ha in 2019, 193 ha in 2020, 1,546 ha in 2021. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 5,499 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 4.3% of the area of London (68 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. Bogal where it started
    6,791 ha reached on 2 Feb
    5.4 %
  2. 54 ha reached on 10 Feb
    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 2020
Built-up area3.6 ha
Residents≈ 600

Inside the perimeter there were about 3.6 hectares of built-up land and about 600 residents (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)
5 Feb 39.2 °C 15 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
6 Feb 39.5 °C 15 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
7 Feb 40.5 °C 16 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
8 Feb 39.4 °C 12 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
9 Feb 38.8 °C 15 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
10 Feb 38.8 °C 12 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 66
11 Feb 37.7 °C 11 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 70
12 Feb 35.5 °C 11 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
13 Feb 36.2 °C 11 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 68
14 Feb after 36.9 °C 13 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
15 Feb after 36.8 °C 14 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
16 Feb after 37.4 °C 14 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
17 Feb after 37.2 °C 15 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
18 Feb after 36.3 °C 16 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
19 Feb after 37.7 °C 17 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
20 Feb after 39.2 °C 15 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
21 Feb after 39.7 °C 13 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
22 Feb after 38.4 °C 20 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
23 Feb after 37.4 °C 25 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 29 Jan 2022
After · 20 Feb 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 · 343Every 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 Senegal ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Bogal fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 5 February 2022 and 13 February 2022: 9 days between the first and last heat detection of the perimeter.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,806 hectares (68.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Bogal (6,791 ha, 5.4 %); Diaroumé (54 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 40.5 °C, humidity dropped to 11 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 70, class Very extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Senegal (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.

Emergency number: 18 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

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.

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.

Report an error
What do you think is wrong?

We will only use your email to reply about this report. Privacy. This is not an emergency service: if there is a fire now, call 18.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 343 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 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.