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GN · Guinea · –

Gougoudjé fire, April 2026 Gougoudjé, Sangaréah

Out · last detection 28 Apr 2026, 14:13 UTC

The fire started on 14 April 2026 in Gougoudjé, Guinea, and satellites saw it burning for 15 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,701 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

Number 133 in Guinea in 2026, of 269.

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.

Burnt area
2,701ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
15days
14 Apr 2026 – 28 Apr 2026
Municipalities hit
2
sub-prefectures
Started on
14 Apr
2026
Heat detections
68
in a single hotspot: 38 MW
Danger at start
40
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
37MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 14 Apr28 Apr
28 Apr 2026

How it evolved, day by day

14 Apr 2026 · 18 MW · 5 15 Apr 2026 · 15 MW · 4 16 Apr 2026 · 50 MW · 8 17 Apr 2026 · 27 MW · 7 18 Apr 2026 · 98 MW · 18 19 Apr 2026 · 128 MW · 9 20 Apr 2026 · 11 MW · 6 21 Apr 2026 · 10 MW · 1 22 Apr 2026 · 11 MW · 1 24 Apr 2026 · 1 MW · 1 26 Apr 2026 · 63 MW · 7 28 Apr 2026 · 7 MW · 1
14 Apr 19 Apr 24 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

37°high
35km/h · peak gust
21%lowest humidity

It had gone 17 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.2 mm on 4 May.

This area had burned before

59% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,270 ha in 2017, 17 ha in 2019, 1,320 ha in 2021, 42 ha in 2022. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,594 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1.7% of the area of London (27 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. Gougoudjé where it started
    2,651 ha reached on 14 Apr
    15 %
  2. 66 ha reached on 19 Apr
    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.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2025
Built-up area9.1 ha
Residents≈ 1,700

Inside the perimeter there were about 9.1 hectares of built-up land and about 1,700 residents (GHSL 2025, 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. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.

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)
14 Apr 35.4 °C 29 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
15 Apr 36.2 °C 26 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
16 Apr 37.2 °C 23 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
17 Apr 35.5 °C 25 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
18 Apr 36.9 °C 24 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
19 Apr 36.2 °C 22 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
20 Apr 36.1 °C 26 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
21 Apr 36.2 °C 27 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
22 Apr 36.6 °C 27 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
23 Apr 36.8 °C 22 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
24 Apr 37.1 °C 21 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
25 Apr 37.1 °C 28 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
26 Apr 34.1 °C 35 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
27 Apr 34.8 °C 29 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
28 Apr 35.5 °C 27 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
29 Apr after 34.8 °C 25 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
30 Apr after 36.9 °C 27 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
1 May after 36.9 °C 26 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
2 May after 36.1 °C 31 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
3 May after 34.0 °C 44 % 29 km/h 0.1 mm High 31
4 May after 36.1 °C 36 % 24 km/h 2.2 mm Moderate 19

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 7 Apr 2026
After · 5 May 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 21 April 2026 the air beside the fire reached 130 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 92: 6.1 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak130 µg/m³
Days over the guideline13 days
PM10187 µg/m³
Optical depth1.15
12 Apr15 Apr18 Apr21 Apr24 Apr
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 · 68Every 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 Guinea

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Gougoudjé fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 14 April 2026 to 28 April 2026 (15 days). The perimeter dates it from 14 April 2026 to 21 April 2026.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 2,701 hectares (27.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Gougoudjé (2,651 ha, 15 %); Sangaréah (66 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 37.2 °C, humidity dropped to 21 % and gusts hit 35 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 45, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Guinea (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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 21 April 2026 → 28 April 2026.

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.
  • Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 14 April 2026 to 21 April 2026. 68 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 2025, 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 ADM3 (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY 3.0 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.