How long did the Bosso fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 6 November 2019 and 10 November 2019: 5 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 1,192 hectares (11.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Bosso (1,200 ha, 0.7 %).

Where does this data come from?

From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Niger (OCHA COD-AB). It is not an official report.

NE · Niger · 2019-11-06 → 2019-11-10

Bosso fire, 6 November 2019 Bosso

Out · last detection 10 Nov 2019, 13:14 UTC

The fire started on 6 November 2019 in Bosso, Niger, and satellites saw it burning for 5 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,192 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 49th largest in Diffa since 2016 (of 61 with a page). Number 16 in Niger in 2019, of 21.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Bosso · 2018 Abadam · 2021 Abadam · 2019 Abadam · 2016

Burnt area: 1,192ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 5days; 6 Nov 2019 – 10 Nov 2019
Municipalities hit: 1; communes
Started on: 6 Nov; 2019
Heat detections: 37; in a single hotspot: 89 MW
Average daily power: 149MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 6 Nov10 Nov

Play back 10 Nov 2019

How it evolved, day by day

6 Nov 7 Nov 8 Nov 9 Nov 10 Nov

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

This area had burned before

1% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 14 ha in 2018.

14 ha Bosso fire, April 2018 1,662 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 0.8% of the area of London (12 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

Bosso where it started

1,200 ha reached on 31 Oct

0.7 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance is from the town centre 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.

↔

Before · 30 Oct 2019

After · 17 Nov 2019

Before After

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 · 37Every 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

All fires in Niger ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Bosso fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 6 November 2019 and 10 November 2019: 5 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 1,192 hectares (11.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Bosso (1,200 ha, 0.7 %).
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Niger (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

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

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?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

What really happened?

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How we know this

Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 37 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
We have not matched this page with any official record.

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 OCHA COD-AB (IGNN) (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.

Where it burned