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TD · Chad · –

Kimiti fire, 15 December 2025 Kimiti

Out · last detection 17 Dec 2025, 00:37 UTC

The fire started on 15 December 2025 in Kimiti, Chad, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,090 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 217 in Chad in 2025, of 233.

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.

The power measured by the satellite is low (17.7 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
2,090ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
3days
15 Dec 2025 – 17 Dec 2025
Municipalities hit
1
departments
Started on
15 Dec
2025
Heat detections
34
in a single hotspot: 18 MW
Danger at start
59
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
69MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 15 Dec17 Dec
17 Dec 2025

How it evolved, day by day

15 Dec 2025 · 72 MW · 11 16 Dec 2025 · 131 MW · 20 17 Dec 2025 · 5 MW · 3
15 Dec 16 Dec 17 Dec

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

The weather it burned in

32°high
38km/h · peak gust
11%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

97% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 183 ha in 2016, 1,571 ha in 2017, 488 ha in 2018, 22 ha in 2019, 334 ha in 2022, 1,362 ha in 2023, 30 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 2,033 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1.3% of the area of London (21 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. Kimiti where it started
    2,105 ha reached on 15 Dec
    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.

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 Very dry air: 54 % of the area in Chad 60 days without rain: 44 % of the area in Chad

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
15 Dec 32.4 °C 11 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
16 Dec 31.0 °C 14 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
17 Dec 31.3 °C 14 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
18 Dec after 31.3 °C 12 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
19 Dec after 32.4 °C 12 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
20 Dec after 33.6 °C 12 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
21 Dec after 34.6 °C 10 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
22 Dec after 35.0 °C 9 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
23 Dec after 35.4 °C 9 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
24 Dec after 36.1 °C 9 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
25 Dec after 36.6 °C 8 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
26 Dec after 36.4 °C 8 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
27 Dec after 35.9 °C 10 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 8 Dec 2025
After · 24 Dec 2025

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 16 December 2025 the air beside the fire reached 78 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 48: 3.2 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak78 µg/m³
Days over the guideline8 days
PM10311 µg/m³
Optical depth0.30
13 Dec15 Dec17 Dec19 Dec
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 · 34Every 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 Chad

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Kimiti fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 15 December 2025 and 17 December 2025: 3 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 2,090 hectares (20.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Kimiti (2,105 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 32.4 °C, humidity dropped to 11 % and gusts hit 38 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 59, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Chad (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.

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. 34 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 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.