How long did the Ghanzi fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 1 October 2022 to 15 October 2022 (15 days). The perimeter dates it from 1 October 2022 to 14 October 2022.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 25,624 hectares (256.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Ghanzi (25,568 ha, 0.2 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 38.0 °C, humidity dropped to 8 % and gusts hit 51 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 74, class Very extreme.

Where does this data come from?

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

BW · Botswana · 2022-10-01 → 2022-10-15

Ghanzi fire, 1 October 2022 Ghanzi

Out · last detection 15 Oct 2022, 12:02 UTC

The fire started on 1 October 2022 in Ghanzi, Botswana, and satellites saw it burning for 15 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 25,624 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 19th largest in Ghanzi since 2016 (of 451 with a page). Number 16 in Botswana in 2022, of 327.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Ghanzi · 2020 Ghanzi · 2017 Ghanzi · 2022 Ngamiland West · 2023

Burnt area: 25,624ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 15days; 1 Oct 2022 – 15 Oct 2022
Municipalities hit: 1; subdistricts
Started on: 1 Oct; 2022
Heat detections: 1,037; in a single hotspot: 147 MW
Danger at start: 53; Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power: 855MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Oct15 Oct

Play back 15 Oct 2022

How it evolved, day by day

1 Oct 4 Oct 6 Oct 7 Oct 10 Oct 13 Oct

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

51km/h · peak gust

8%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.3 mm on 20 Oct.

This area had burned before

8% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,904 ha in 2017, 378 ha in 2020. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 2,136 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 16% of the area of London (256 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

Ghanzi where it started

25,568 ha reached on 1 Oct

0.2 %

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 area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (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)
1 Oct	36.6 °C	12 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 53
2 Oct	37.6 °C	9 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 63
3 Oct	36.9 °C	11 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
4 Oct	37.7 °C	9 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 53
5 Oct	38.0 °C	8 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 60
6 Oct	37.4 °C	10 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 66
7 Oct	36.7 °C	11 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 59
8 Oct	35.8 °C	11 %	51 km/h	0.0 mm	Very extreme 74
9 Oct	35.4 °C	10 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 68
10 Oct	35.7 °C	9 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 63
11 Oct	34.7 °C	10 %	47 km/h	0.0 mm	Very extreme 71
12 Oct	35.1 °C	11 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 67
13 Oct	35.9 °C	10 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 65
14 Oct	35.9 °C	11 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 68
15 Oct	36.0 °C	10 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 69
16 Oct after	30.0 °C	17 %	55 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 69
17 Oct after	24.0 °C	38 %	49 km/h	0.4 mm	Very high 44
18 Oct after	30.0 °C	33 %	42 km/h	0.7 mm	High 37
19 Oct after	31.0 °C	29 %	36 km/h	0.4 mm	High 37
20 Oct after	32.6 °C	25 %	41 km/h	2.3 mm	High 28

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 24 Sept 2022

After · 22 Oct 2022

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.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 5 October 2022 the air beside the fire reached 267 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 98: 6.5 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak267 µg/m³

Days over the guideline16 days

PM10382 µg/m³

Optical depth1.56

WHO 15

29301234567891011121314151617

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 · 1,037Every 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 Botswana ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Ghanzi fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 1 October 2022 to 15 October 2022 (15 days). The perimeter dates it from 1 October 2022 to 14 October 2022.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 25,624 hectares (256.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Ghanzi (25,568 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 38.0 °C, humidity dropped to 8 % and gusts hit 51 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 74, class Very extreme.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Botswana (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

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

27 October 2026 Last day with fire: 14 October 2022 → 15 October 2022.

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?

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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 1 October 2022 to 14 October 2022. 1,037 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 (Public Domain). 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