Kompienga fire, March 2026 Kompienga
The fire started on 21 March 2026 in Kompienga, Burkina Faso, and satellites saw it burning for 2 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,760 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 186th largest in Goulmou since 2016 (of 529 with a page). Number 73 in Burkina Faso in 2026, of 191.
The power measured by the satellite is low (3.9 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
- 1,760ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 2days
- 21 Mar 2026 – 22 Mar 2026
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- communes
- Started on
- 21 Mar
- 2026
- Heat detections
- 16
- in a single hotspot: 4 MW
- Average daily power
- 34MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
22 Mar 2026 · 34 MW · 16
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
This area had burned before
38% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 679 ha in 2024, 670 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 667 ha that had burned before.
- 396 ha Soudougui fire, December 2025 13,273 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 345 ha Kompienga fire, February 2024 1,173 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 305 ha Kompienga fire, November 2024 2,053 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 274 ha Kompienga fire, November 2025 1,536 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 30 ha Kompienga fire, November 2024 1,139 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
Kompienga where it started1,771 ha reached on 22 Mar2.9 %
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.
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
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 · CopernicusOn 19 March 2026 the air beside the fire reached 30 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 23: 1.5 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
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 · 16Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Kompienga fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 21 March 2026 and 22 March 2026: 2 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 1,760 hectares (17.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Kompienga (1,771 ha, 2.9 %).
- 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.
No changes 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.
Report an error
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. 16 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
- We have not matched this page with any official record.
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.