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BF · Burkina Faso · –

Diabo fire, 31 October 2026 Bissiga, Diabo, Komin-Yanga

Burning · last detection 7 Nov 2026, 01:56 UTC

The fire started on 31 October 2026 in Diabo, Burkina Faso, and satellites saw it burning for 7 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,025 hectares from heat detections, spread across 3 municipalities.

Number 30 in Burkina Faso in 2026, of 358.

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.

Is it still active?

Satellites detected fire on 7 Nov 2026, 01:56 UTC. Everything suggests it is still burning. 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
5,025ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
7days
31 Oct 2026 – 6 Nov 2026
Municipalities hit
3
communes
Started on
31 Oct
2026
Heat detections
89
in a single hotspot: 137 MW
Danger at start
28
High · FWI index
Average daily power
163MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 31 Oct6 Nov
7 Nov 2026

How it evolved, day by day

31 Oct 2026 · 3 MW · 1 1 Nov 2026 · 296 MW · 29 2 Nov 2026 · 143 MW · 24 3 Nov 2026 · 209 MW · 15 4 Nov 2026 · 0 MW · 0 6 Nov 2026 · 322 MW · 20 7 Nov 2026 · 3 MW · 2
31 Oct 2 Nov 6 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

38°high
29km/h · peak gust
24%lowest humidity

It had gone one day without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

8% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 121 ha in 2024, 321 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 398 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 3.2% of the area of London (50 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. 2,863 ha reached on 1 Nov
    9.4 %
  2. Diabo where it started
    2,289 ha reached on 31 Oct
    3.0 %
  3. 19 ha
    0.0 %

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.

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)
31 Oct 36.0 °C 28 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
1 Nov 36.3 °C 27 % 18 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
2 Nov 36.1 °C 34 % 22 km/h 0.1 mm High 30
3 Nov 36.6 °C 36 % 29 km/h 0.3 mm High 25
4 Nov 35.7 °C 34 % 22 km/h 0.5 mm High 28
5 Nov 37.7 °C 24 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
6 Nov 35.9 °C 30 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm High 28

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 24 Oct 2026
After · 6 Nov 2026

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 · Copernicus

On 31 October 2026 the air beside the fire reached 39 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 26: 1.8 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak39 µg/m³
Days over the guideline4 days
PM1072 µg/m³
Optical depth0.35
2930311
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 · 89Every 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 Burkina Faso

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Diabo fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 31 October 2026 and 6 November 2026: 7 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 5,025 hectares (50.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 3 municipalities: Bissiga (2,863 ha, 9.4 %); Diabo (2,289 ha, 3.0 %); Komin-Yanga (19 ha, 0.0 %).
Is the Diabo fire still active?
Yes: satellites detected fire on 7 Nov 2026, 01:56 UTC. Check the emergency service for the official status.
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 37.7 °C, humidity dropped to 24 % and gusts hit 29 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 30, class High.
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 · 4 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 2 November 2026.
  1. Area: 3,630 → 3,725 ha.
  2. Area: 2,877 → 3,630 ha.
  3. Area: 1,914 → 2,877 ha.
  4. Page published (1,914 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.

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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. 89 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.

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 (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.