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Gbo fire, March 2026 Gbo

Out · last detection 31 Mar 2026, 14:17 UTC

The fire started on 29 March 2026 in Gbo, Sierra Leone, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,104 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 302th largest in Southern since 2016 (of 393 with a page). Number 255 in Sierra Leone in 2026, of 305.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Selenga · 2025Gbo · 2024Tikonko · 2026Kamajei · 2026

Burnt area
1,104ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
3days
29 Mar 2026 – 31 Mar 2026
Municipalities hit
1
chiefdoms
Started on
29 Mar
2026
Heat detections
29
in a single hotspot: 134 MW
Average daily power
466MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

31 Mar 2026
HOTSPOTS BY DAY 29 Mar31 Mar

How it evolved, day by day

30 Mar 2026 · 636 MW · 13 31 Mar 2026 · 295 MW · 12
30 Mar 31 Mar

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

This area had burned before

4% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 3 ha in 2024, 42 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 42 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 0.7% of the area of London (11 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. Gbo where it started
    1,111 ha reached on 30 Mar
    5.8 %

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 · 22 Mar 2026
After · 7 Apr 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 30 March 2026 the air beside the fire reached 54 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 33: 2.2 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak54 µg/m³
Days over the guideline8 days
PM1098 µg/m³
Optical depth0.73
2728293031123
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 · 29Every 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 Sierra Leone ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Gbo fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 29 March 2026 and 31 March 2026: 3 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 1,104 hectares (11.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Gbo (1,111 ha, 5.8 %).
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Sierra Leone (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.

Satellite cross-check

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.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 29 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 geoBoundaries ADM3 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (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.