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BF · Burkina Faso · –

Kombori fire, February 2026 Kombori

Out · last detection 19 Feb 2026, 13:27 UTC

The fire started on 17 February 2026 in Kombori, Burkina Faso, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,210 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 33 in Burkina Faso in 2026, of 377.

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
5,210ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
3days
17 Feb 2026 – 19 Feb 2026
Municipalities hit
1
communes
Started on
17 Feb
2026
Heat detections
96
in a single hotspot: 34 MW
Danger at start
63
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
298MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 17 Feb19 Feb
19 Feb 2026

How it evolved, day by day

17 Feb 2026 · 654 MW · 41 18 Feb 2026 · 186 MW · 35 19 Feb 2026 · 55 MW · 20
17 Feb 18 Feb 19 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

34°high
42km/h · peak gust
7%lowest humidity

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

This area had burned before

54% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 173 ha in 2020, 392 ha in 2021, 2,298 ha in 2024, 420 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 2,799 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 3.3% of the area of London (52 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. Kombori where it started
    3,610 ha reached on 17 Feb
    16 %

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 area10 ha
Residents≈ 1,800

Inside the perimeter there were about 10 hectares of built-up land and about 1,800 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)

Started with Very dry air: 56 % of the area in Burkina Faso 60 days without rain: 26 % of the area in Burkina Faso

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
17 Feb 31.5 °C 8 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
18 Feb 32.9 °C 8 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
19 Feb 34.3 °C 7 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
20 Feb after 34.6 °C 8 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
21 Feb after 34.4 °C 8 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 64
22 Feb after 34.9 °C 9 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
23 Feb after 35.7 °C 9 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
24 Feb after 35.0 °C 11 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
25 Feb after 34.7 °C 12 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
26 Feb after 35.0 °C 11 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
27 Feb after 36.1 °C 10 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
28 Feb after 35.2 °C 12 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
1 Mar after 33.0 °C 15 % 34 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 · 10 Feb 2026
After · 26 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 16 February 2026 the air beside the fire reached 136 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 97: 6.5 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak136 µg/m³
Days over the guideline8 days
PM10760 µg/m³
Optical depth0.55
15 Feb17 Feb19 Feb21 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 · 96Every 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 Burkina Faso

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Kombori fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 17 February 2026 and 19 February 2026: 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 5,210 hectares (52.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Kombori (3,610 ha, 16 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 34.3 °C, humidity dropped to 7 % and gusts hit 42 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 63, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Burkina Faso (OCHA COD-AB). 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. 96 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 OCHA COD-AB (Institut Geographique Burkina (IGB)) (Creative Commons Attribution for Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY-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.