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Glazoué fire, 22 January 2026 Glazoué

Out · last detection 29 Jan 2026, 13:19 UTC

The fire started on 22 January 2026 in Glazoué, Benin, and satellites saw it burning for 8 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,224 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 28th largest in Collines since 2016 (of 47 with a page). Number 68 in Benin in 2026, of 99.

The power measured by the satellite is low (25.0 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…
Burnt area
1,224ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
8days
22 Jan 2026 – 29 Jan 2026
Municipalities hit
1
communes
Started on
22 Jan
2026
Heat detections
30
in a single hotspot: 25 MW
Average daily power
26MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 22 Jan29 Jan
29 Jan 2026

How it evolved, day by day

22 Jan 2026 · 13 MW · 2 23 Jan 2026 · 33 MW · 8 24 Jan 2026 · 29 MW · 11 26 Jan 2026 · 24 MW · 7 29 Jan 2026 · 29 MW · 2
22 Jan 23 Jan 24 Jan 26 Jan 29 Jan

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

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

10 km
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

  1. Glazoué where it started
    1,232 ha reached on 22 Jan
    0.7 %

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.

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 15 Jan 2026
After · 5 Feb 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 27 January 2026 the air beside the fire reached 80 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 69: 4.6 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak80 µg/m³
Days over the guideline13 days
PM10297 µg/m³
Optical depth0.96
2021222324252627282930311
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 · 30Every 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 Benin ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Glazoué fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 22 January 2026 to 29 January 2026 (8 days). The perimeter dates it from 22 January 2026 to 26 January 2026.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 1,224 hectares (12.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Glazoué (1,232 ha, 0.7 %).
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Benin (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

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.

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.

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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 22 January 2026 to 26 January 2026. 30 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 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.