Burned area
satellite only4,492ha
Perimeter published by GWIS (Copernicus).
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus)
- Date
- 2 Jan 2024 – 6 Jan 2024
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page to compare it with.
NG · Nigeria · –
Kontagora fire, January 2024 Kontagora, Mariga
Out · last detection 6 Jan 2024, 13:51 UTC
The fire started on 2 January 2024 in Kontagora, Nigeria, and satellites saw it burning for 5 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 4,492 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.
It is the 52th largest in Niger since 2016 (of 222 with a page). Number 21 in Nigeria in 2024, of 118.
Use this data
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Use this data
Fire page data · version 2026-10-24matches the official recordwith caveatssatellite onlymodel
When copying, the sentence is
Tick the figures you want: they make up the lede and the CSV.
Duration by satellite
satellite only5days
2 Jan 2024 to 6 Jan 2024: first and last day with fire on the page.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- last detection: 6 Jan 2024, 13:51 UTC
+− cross-check
Satellites pass a few times a day and cloud or smoke can hide the fire: a lack of detections is not an official extinction. Each country’s emergency service declares a fire contained or out.
Start
satellite only2 Jan 2024
First day with fire seen by the satellites or the perimeter.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- 2 Jan 2024
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page, so the alert time and the cause are not known here.
The worst day
satellite only588MW
Total radiative power on 4 January 2024; hotspots that day: 66.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (FRP)
- Date
- 4 Jan 2024
+− cross-check
Fire radiative power (FRP) measures the energy the fire gives off when the satellite passes. Added up by day, it compares intensity, not area.
Danger at the start
model44.1FWI · very high
Fire Weather Index (Canadian system) computed by WorldFires for the day the fire started. Consecutive days without rain before: 36.
- Source
- WorldFires calculation (Canadian FWI system)
- Date
- 2 Jan 2024, local noon
- Model
- ERA5 0,25° (ECMWF · Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com
+− cross-check
This is an index computed from weather model data, not a measurement of the fire nor an official warning. Danger warnings are issued by each country’s authority. Emergency number and official warnings
Weather during the fire
model36.4°C · 19% RH
High of 36.4 °C and minimum humidity of 19% on 6 January 2024; gusts of 31 km/h on 5 January 2024.
- Source
- weather model at the fire’s grid cell
- Date
- 2 Jan 2024 – 6 Jan 2024
- Model
- ERA5 0,25° (ECMWF · Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com
+− cross-check
These are model values for a cell of about 25 km, not from a weather station: they may differ from what was measured on the ground.
Living inside
model≈ 500people
Estimated residents inside the perimeter and 5.3 ha of built-up area (100 m grid, epoch 2025).
- Source
- GHSL R2023A · JRC
- Date
- calculated on 24 October 2026
+− cross-check
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.
This page’s change log has been kept since 24 October 2026: every night what it publishes is compared and the difference is logged. Anything earlier is reconstructed from each source’s date and marked as reconstructed.
Show
-
· reconstructed weatherWeather and FWI computed from the ERA5 reanalysis
-
· reconstructed GHSLPopulation and built-up area computed
What was saved on 24 October 2026
Every night a snapshot of what the page shows is saved. If anything changes, it appears in the list as a log entry.
- Area
- 4,492 ha
- Dates
- 2 Jan 2024 – 6 Jan 2024
- Name
- Kontagora
- Official record
- —
Versioned permanent link
https://worldfires.org/en/fire/kontagora-2024-01?v=2026-10-24A version keeps the area, dates, name and official record; the area as it was logged (changes under 2% are not logged). The map, hotspots and weather always show today’s data.
Citation
A lede of about 60 words figures only, no adjectives
CSV for this fire kontagora-2024-01.csv · daily, no individual hotspots
| fecha | focos_viirs | frp_mw | tmax_c | tmin_c | hr_min_pct | viento_max_kmh | racha_max_kmh | precip_mm | fwi | clase_fwi | dentro_del_incendio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-01-02 | 4 | 27 | 35.5 | 21.7 | 21 | 14.1 | 29.5 | 0 | 44.1 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2024-01-03 | 42 | 406 | 34.7 | 20.3 | 22 | 11.3 | 23 | 0 | 41.6 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2024-01-04 | 66 | 588 | 35.4 | 20.8 | 20 | 13 | 24.5 | 0 | 43.6 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2024-01-05 | 30 | 129 | 35.7 | 21.5 | 23 | 14.4 | 31 | 0 | 45.4 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2024-01-06 | 18 | 66 | 36.4 | 21.1 | 19 | 14.4 | 30.6 | 0 | 45.7 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2024-01-07 | 0 | 0 | 35.3 | 21.1 | 21 | 13.1 | 28.1 | 0 | 44.6 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2024-01-08 | 0 | 0 | 35.8 | 20.6 | 16 | 13.7 | 29.5 | 0 | 45.8 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2024-01-09 | 0 | 0 | 36 | 21.7 | 18 | 13.8 | 27.4 | 0 | 46.1 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2024-01-10 | 0 | 0 | 35.8 | 20.9 | 15 | 16.1 | 33.5 | 0 | 49.4 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2024-01-11 | 0 | 0 | 36 | 21.6 | 14 | 17 | 35.3 | 0 | 51.6 | extremo | 0 |
| 2024-01-12 | 0 | 0 | 35 | 21.3 | 13 | 17.5 | 36.4 | 0 | 52.6 | extremo | 0 |
| 2024-01-13 | 0 | 0 | 34.9 | 20.6 | 14 | 16.9 | 36 | 0 | 52.2 | extremo | 0 |
| 2024-01-14 | 0 | 0 | 34.1 | 20.2 | 13 | 18.7 | 38.9 | 0 | 54.6 | extremo | 0 |
| 2024-01-15 | 0 | 0 | 33 | 19.1 | 16 | 18.8 | 39.2 | 0 | 55.1 | extremo | 0 |
| 2024-01-16 | 0 | 0 | 33.4 | 19.5 | 17 | 17 | 34.9 | 0 | 53.1 | extremo | 0 |
It is generated in your browser from this page’s data: one file per fire, aggregated by day and without individual hotspots.
Live widget for your story
It updates itself while the fire is still active and links to this page. Free, with the attribution shown at the bottom.
Sources for this page: GWIS (Copernicus), NASA FIRMS (VIIRS), ERA5 (ECMWF/Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0), GHSL (JRC). Open-Meteo.com · How we build fire pages: methodology
- Burnt area
- 4,492ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 5days
- 2 Jan 2024 – 6 Jan 2024
- Municipalities hit
- 2
- local government areas
- Started on
- 2 Jan
- 2024
- Heat detections
- 160
- in a single hotspot: 0 MW
- Danger at start
- 44
- Very high · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 243MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
HOTSPOTS BY DAY
2 Jan6 Jan
6 Jan 2024
How it evolved, day by day
2 Jan
3 Jan
4 Jan
5 Jan
6 Jan
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
31km/h · peak gust
19%lowest humidity
It had gone 36 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.
This area had burned before
73% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 812 ha in 2016, 3,390 ha in 2022, 1,314 ha in 2023. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 3,290 ha that had burned before.
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
-
Kontagora where it started4,182 ha2.3 %
-
341 ha0.0 %
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 2025Built-up area5.3 ha
Residents≈ 500
Inside the perimeter there were about 5.3 hectares of built-up land and about 500 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)
| Day | High | Min. humidity | Peak gust | Rain | Danger (FWI) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 Jan | 35.5 °C | 21 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 3 Jan | 34.7 °C | 22 % | 23 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 42 |
| 4 Jan | 35.4 °C | 20 % | 24 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 5 Jan | 35.7 °C | 23 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 45 |
| 6 Jan | 36.4 °C | 19 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 46 |
| 7 Jan after | 35.3 °C | 21 % | 28 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 45 |
| 8 Jan after | 35.8 °C | 16 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 46 |
| 9 Jan after | 36.0 °C | 18 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 46 |
| 10 Jan after | 35.8 °C | 15 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 49 |
| 11 Jan after | 36.0 °C | 14 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 52 |
| 12 Jan after | 35.0 °C | 13 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 53 |
| 13 Jan after | 34.9 °C | 14 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 52 |
| 14 Jan after | 34.1 °C | 13 % | 39 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 55 |
| 15 Jan after | 33.0 °C | 16 % | 39 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 55 |
| 16 Jan after | 33.4 °C | 17 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 53 |
Its twins: fires that started in the same weather
It started with an FWI of 44.1, a minimum humidity of 21% and 36 days without rain. Fires in the area that started in weather like this since 2016: 15.
FWI at the start
44.1
Minimum humidity
21 %
Days without rain
36
this fire
chosen twins
rest of the area
Almost identicalSimilar
Outlines of the closest twins
This fire · Kontagora fire, January 2024
4,492 ha
5 days
FWI 44.1
Min. humidity 21 %
Birnin Gwari fire, December 2021
2,091 ha
10 days
FWI 44.6
Min. humidity 19 %
87 km away, in 2021
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
Birnin Gwari fire, December 2021
2,277 ha
9 days
FWI 45.2
Min. humidity 21 %
142 km away, in 2021
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
Tureta fire, December 2024
2,281 ha
9 days
FWI 43.4
Min. humidity 21 %
190 km away, in 2024
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
Faskari fire, November 2021
6,223 ha
16 days
FWI 44.6
Min. humidity 20 %
219 km away, in 2021
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
Maru fire, November 2016
14,756 ha
25 days
FWI 45.9
Min. humidity 21 %
148 km away, in 2016
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: none in the following ten days.
What happened to them
- 10 days
- median duration
- 2,349 ha
- median area
- 100 %
- went past 1,000 ha
- —
- rain at the end (median; 0 of 15 had it)
It was 1.9 times larger than the median of its twins and lasted 5 days, against 10 days.
Only 2 of its 15 twins burned more. The weather on the first day does not explain everything: the wind in the following days, the fuel and the firefighting also count. In none of them did 1 mm fall in the ten days after the end: they all went out without rain.
This is a bank of analogues: it shows what usually happens, not what will happen. With fewer than 15 twins we give no figures. How we calculate it
How it ended
—first rain
—no rain in ten days
31km/h · max. gust
It was considered over on 6 Jan, and not even 1 mm fell in the following ten days: it went out without rain. None of its 15 twins had rain when they ended.
Weather on this page: Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)
How a twin is chosen
- Same area: fires that have already ended, less than 250 km from this one, since 2016.
- Same start: we compare the FWI on the first day, the minimum humidity that day and the run of days without rain before it. The slider sets how much they may differ.
- Only pages with final weather data (ERA5 reanalysis) calculated in the same way as this fire’s; agricultural and grass burns and pages with data under review are left out.
- Fires burning at the same time as this one (a week before or after) are left out: they share the same spell of weather and do not count as a precedent.
- They are sorted by similarity, and the outlines of the first five are drawn.
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
↔
Before · 26 Dec 2023
After · 13 Jan 2024
Sentinel-2 did not pass over on that day. Try another date, or use false colour, which is daily.
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 31 December 2023 the air beside the fire reached 211 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 152: 10 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
PM2.5 peak211 µg/m³
Days over the guideline10 days
PM10408 µg/m³
Optical depth1.38
WHO 15
31 Dec2 Jan4 Jan6 Jan8 Jan
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 time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 16,478 haMariga10 January 2026 · 23 days · 13 km away
- 19,178 haMariga20 December 2023 · 30 days · 15 km away
- 26,493 haMarigaDecember 2020 · 30 days · 21 km away
- 92,561 haKontagora18 December 2025 · 46 days · 26 km away
- 18,293 haMariga2 January 2025 · 17 days · 26 km away
- 15,898 haMariga10 December 2023 · 27 days · 38 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Kontagora fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 2 January 2024 and 6 January 2024: 5 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 4,492 hectares (44.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 2 municipalities: Kontagora (4,182 ha, 2.3 %); Mariga (341 ha, 0.0 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 36.4 °C, humidity dropped to 19 % and gusts hit 31 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 46, class Very high.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Nigeria (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.
- How did the fires that started in similar weather in this area end?
- Fires less than 250 km away that started since 2016 with a similar FWI, humidity and dry spell: 15. Their median duration was 10 days and their median area 2,349 ha; 100 % went past 1,000 ha. Only 2 of its 15 twins burned more. The weather on the first day does not explain everything: the wind in the following days, the fuel and the firefighting also count. In none of them did 1 mm fall in the ten days after the end: they all went out without rain.
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
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 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.
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. 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.
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.