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KH · Cambodia · –

Kaoh Nheaek fire, 6 February 2026 Kaoh Nheaek

Out · last detection 17 Feb 2026, 05:38 UTC

The fire started on 6 February 2026 in Kaoh Nheaek, Cambodia, and satellites saw it burning for 11 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,822 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 17 in Cambodia in 2026, of 120.

GWIS near-real-time perimeter, from the layer that changed in October 2025: this fire is not compared with fires from earlier years, because since then the GWIS layer gives more and larger perimeters.

Burnt area
6,822ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
11days
6 Feb 2026 – 16 Feb 2026
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
6 Feb
2026
Heat detections
154
in a single hotspot: 0 MW
Danger at start
25
High · FWI index
Average daily power
115MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 6 Feb16 Feb
17 Feb 2026

How it evolved, day by day

6 Feb 2026 · 11 MW · 2 8 Feb 2026 · 46 MW · 13 9 Feb 2026 · 262 MW · 37 10 Feb 2026 · 132 MW · 28 11 Feb 2026 · 3 MW · 3 12 Feb 2026 · 5 MW · 4 13 Feb 2026 · 102 MW · 16 14 Feb 2026 · 251 MW · 24 15 Feb 2026 · 74 MW · 8 16 Feb 2026 · 353 MW · 14 17 Feb 2026 · 27 MW · 5
6 Feb 10 Feb 13 Feb 16 Feb

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

The weather it burned in

36°high
58km/h · peak gust
26%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 3.1 mm on 26 Feb.

This area had burned before

82% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,428 ha in 2016, 751 ha in 2017, 1,062 ha in 2018, 47 ha in 2019, 2,475 ha in 2020, 1,911 ha in 2021, 1,049 ha in 2022. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 5,618 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 4.3% of the area of London (68 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. Kaoh Nheaek where it started
    6,859 ha
    1.3 %

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 area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (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)

Started with 60 days without rain: 11 % of the area in Cambodia

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
6 Feb 34.6 °C 35 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
7 Feb 32.9 °C 41 % 34 km/h 0.1 mm High 32
8 Feb 33.6 °C 31 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
9 Feb 33.4 °C 34 % 58 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
10 Feb 34.8 °C 34 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
11 Feb 29.0 °C 61 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
12 Feb 34.0 °C 37 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
13 Feb 34.9 °C 26 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
14 Feb 35.2 °C 28 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
15 Feb 34.5 °C 38 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
16 Feb 36.2 °C 34 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
17 Feb after 35.0 °C 35 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
18 Feb after 34.3 °C 37 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
19 Feb after 34.0 °C 35 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
20 Feb after 35.0 °C 29 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
21 Feb after 36.0 °C 24 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
22 Feb after 35.2 °C 29 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
23 Feb after 35.8 °C 34 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
24 Feb after 35.6 °C 34 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
25 Feb after 34.9 °C 28 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
26 Feb after 36.5 °C 39 % 23 km/h 3.1 mm Moderate 14

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 30 Jan 2026
After · 23 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 6 February 2026 the air beside the fire reached 44 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 35: 2.3 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak44 µg/m³
Days over the guideline3 days
PM1046 µg/m³
Optical depth1.08
4 Feb8 Feb12 Feb16 Feb
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 · 0Every 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 Cambodia

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Kaoh Nheaek fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 6 February 2026 and 16 February 2026: 11 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 6,822 hectares (68.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Kaoh Nheaek (6,859 ha, 1.3 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 36.2 °C, humidity dropped to 26 % and gusts hit 58 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 41, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Cambodia (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 · 4 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 23 February 2026 → 16 February 2026.
  2. Start date: 31 January 2026 → 6 February 2026.
  3. Last day with fire: 16 February 2026 → 23 February 2026.
  4. Start date: 6 February 2026 → 31 January 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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. No 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 ADM2 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (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.