How long did the Kochas fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 10 April 2026 and 22 April 2026: 13 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 39,337 hectares (393.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire entered 9 municipalities: Kargahar (18,977 ha, 56 %); Kochas (10,763 ha, 47 %); Kudra (6,021 ha, 29 %); Sheosagar (2,472 ha, 6.8 %); Sasaram (605 ha, 1.7 %); Dinara (446 ha, 1.3 %); Mohania (158 ha, 0.6 %); Chenari (49 ha, 0.2 %); Rajpur (17 ha, 0.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 43.1 °C, humidity dropped to 10 % and gusts hit 58 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 66, class Extreme.

Where does this data come from?

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

IN · India · 2026-04-10 → 2026-04-22

Kochas fire, 10 April 2026 Kargahar, Kochas, Kudra

Out · last detection 23 Apr 2026, 21:13 UTC

The fire started on 10 April 2026 in Kochas, India, and satellites saw it burning for 13 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 39,337 hectares from heat detections, spread across 9 municipalities.

This entry is very probably agricultural burning of stubble or straw that the satellite has merged into a single perimeter, not a wildfire in natural vegetation. We reviewed it by hand: the perimeter comes only from GWIS, lies on densely populated farmland and matches the season when stubble is burnt after the harvest. That is why it is not included in the wildfire rankings.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Kargahar · 2025 Kochas · 2025 Kochas · 2026

Burnt area: 39,337ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 13days; 10 Apr 2026 – 22 Apr 2026
Municipalities hit: 9; subdistricts
Started on: 10 Apr; 2026
Heat detections: 1,562; in a single hotspot: 158 MW
Danger at start: 48; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 1.0GW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 10 Apr22 Apr

Play back 23 Apr 2026

How it evolved, day by day

10 Apr 12 Apr 14 Apr 16 Apr 18 Apr 20 Apr 22 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

43°high

58km/h · peak gust

10%lowest humidity

It had gone 5 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.4 mm on 30 Apr.

This area had burned before

92% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 8,303 ha in 2016, 7,018 ha in 2017, 14,497 ha in 2018, 12,655 ha in 2019, 5,184 ha in 2020, 12,267 ha in 2021, 16,072 ha in 2022, 6,161 ha in 2023, 13,161 ha in 2024, 30,202 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 36,204 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 25% of the area of London (393 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

Kargahar

18,977 ha

56 %
Kochas where it started

10,763 ha

47 %
Kudra

6,021 ha

29 %
Sheosagar

2,472 ha

6.8 %
Sasaram

605 ha

1.7 %
Dinara

446 ha

1.3 %
Mohania

158 ha

0.6 %
Chenari

49 ha

0.2 %
Rajpur

17 ha

0.1 %

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.

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)
3 Apr	38.3 °C	24 %	58 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
4 Apr	36.8 °C	27 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 41
5 Apr	35.2 °C	23 %	48 km/h	6.4 mm	Moderate 17
6 Apr	33.4 °C	23 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
7 Apr	35.4 °C	19 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
8 Apr	30.3 °C	35 %	33 km/h	3.5 mm	Low 8
9 Apr	31.6 °C	25 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	High 24
10 Apr	34.0 °C	16 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
11 Apr	36.5 °C	14 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 46
12 Apr	38.3 °C	15 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
13 Apr	37.5 °C	13 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
14 Apr	38.5 °C	11 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
15 Apr	40.6 °C	12 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
16 Apr	39.7 °C	16 %	29 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
17 Apr	40.5 °C	15 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
18 Apr	41.6 °C	14 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 56
19 Apr	43.0 °C	10 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 60
20 Apr	43.1 °C	10 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 63
21 Apr	42.3 °C	10 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 63
22 Apr	42.0 °C	11 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 66
23 Apr after	42.4 °C	11 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 62
24 Apr after	42.5 °C	10 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
25 Apr after	42.8 °C	11 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
26 Apr after	41.5 °C	16 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 64
27 Apr after	38.5 °C	30 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
28 Apr after	38.6 °C	28 %	27 km/h	0.2 mm	Very high 44
29 Apr after	39.0 °C	29 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 50
30 Apr after	32.5 °C	42 %	38 km/h	1.4 mm	High 25

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 3 Apr 2026

After · 29 Apr 2026

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 24 April 2026 the air beside the fire reached 95 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 63: 4.2 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak95 µg/m³

Days over the guideline30 days

PM10492 µg/m³

Optical depth1.23

WHO 15

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930

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 · 1,562Every 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 India ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Kochas fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 10 April 2026 and 22 April 2026: 13 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 39,337 hectares (393.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire entered 9 municipalities: Kargahar (18,977 ha, 56 %); Kochas (10,763 ha, 47 %); Kudra (6,021 ha, 29 %); Sheosagar (2,472 ha, 6.8 %); Sasaram (605 ha, 1.7 %); Dinara (446 ha, 1.3 %); Mohania (158 ha, 0.6 %); Chenari (49 ha, 0.2 %); Rajpur (17 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 43.1 °C, humidity dropped to 10 % and gusts hit 58 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 66, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of India (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.

Emergency number: 112 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

Satellite cross-check

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

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.

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?

Your connection to the fire (optional) Email (optional)

We will only use your email to reply about this report. Privacy. This is not an emergency service: if there is a fire now, call 112.

How we know this

Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 1,562 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.
Probably a vegetation burn: not counted in the totals.

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 (Open Data Commons Open Database License 1.0). 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.

Where it burned