How long did the Danlí fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 16 April 2020 to 29 April 2020 (14 days). The perimeter dates it from 16 April 2020 to 28 April 2020.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 4,013 hectares (40.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Danlí (4,037 ha, 1.6 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 34.8 °C, humidity dropped to 18 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 42, class Very high.

Where does this data come from?

From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Honduras (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

HN · Honduras · 2020-04-16 → 2020-04-29

Danlí fire, 16 April 2020 Danlí

Out · last detection 29 Apr 2020, 18:13 UTC

The fire started on 16 April 2020 in Danlí, Honduras, and satellites saw it burning for 14 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 4,013 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 9th largest in El Paraíso since 2016 (of 63 with a page). Number 27 in Honduras in 2020, of 174.

The power measured by the satellite is low (23.8 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Danlí · 2016 Danlí · 2016 Danlí · 2020 Teupasenti · 2020

Burnt area: 4,013ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 14days; 16 Apr 2020 – 29 Apr 2020
Municipalities hit: 1; municipalities
Started on: 16 Apr; 2020
Heat detections: 126; in a single hotspot: 24 MW
Danger at start: 42; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 40MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 16 Apr29 Apr

Play back 29 Apr 2020

How it evolved, day by day

16 Apr 18 Apr 20 Apr 22 Apr 24 Apr 26 Apr 28 Apr

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

The weather it burned in

35°high

48km/h · peak gust

18%lowest humidity

It had gone 37 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.2 mm on 7 May.

This area had burned before

54% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,167 ha in 2016.

2,167 ha Danlí fire, April 2016 4,027 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 2.5% of the area of London (40 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

Danlí where it started

4,037 ha reached on 16 Apr

1.6 %

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.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2020

Built-up area0.47 ha

Residents≈ 70

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.47 hectares of built-up land and about 70 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)
16 Apr	33.0 °C	18 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 42
17 Apr	31.5 °C	29 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
18 Apr	32.7 °C	26 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
19 Apr	32.6 °C	28 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
20 Apr	34.7 °C	27 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 38
21 Apr	34.6 °C	30 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
22 Apr	33.3 °C	33 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
23 Apr	33.9 °C	21 %	29 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
24 Apr	34.8 °C	30 %	32 km/h	0.3 mm	High 37
25 Apr	33.5 °C	30 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 41
26 Apr	32.9 °C	32 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
27 Apr	32.5 °C	25 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
28 Apr	30.7 °C	29 %	48 km/h	0.6 mm	High 36
29 Apr	32.3 °C	24 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
30 Apr after	35.5 °C	23 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
1 May after	31.2 °C	35 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
2 May after	31.5 °C	33 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
3 May after	32.7 °C	29 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	High 38
4 May after	33.7 °C	24 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
5 May after	32.0 °C	29 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
6 May after	33.9 °C	34 %	37 km/h	0.5 mm	High 37
7 May after	32.1 °C	36 %	44 km/h	1.2 mm	High 26

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 9 Apr 2020

After · 6 May 2020

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 · 126Every 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 Honduras ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Danlí fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 16 April 2020 to 29 April 2020 (14 days). The perimeter dates it from 16 April 2020 to 28 April 2020.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 4,013 hectares (40.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Danlí (4,037 ha, 1.6 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 34.8 °C, humidity dropped to 18 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 42, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Honduras (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: 911 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

ICF · Instituto de Conservación Forestal ↗
COPECO ↗

Satellite cross-check

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

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.

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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 16 April 2020 to 28 April 2020. 126 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 ADM2 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (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.

Where it burned