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GW · Guinea-Bissau · →

Mansabá fire, 7 March 2024 Mansabá

Out · last detection 17 Mar 2024, 15:02 UTC

The fire started on 7 March 2024 in Mansabá, Guinea-Bissau, and satellites saw it burning for 11 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,634 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 18th largest in Oio since 2016 (of 58 with a page). Number 14 in Guinea-Bissau in 2024, of 28.

Compare with…
Burnt area
1,634ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
11days
7 Mar 2024 – 17 Mar 2024
Municipalities hit
1
sectors
Started on
7 Mar
2024
Heat detections
40
in a single hotspot: 40 MW
Average daily power
61MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 7 Mar17 Mar
17 Mar 2024

How it evolved, day by day

7 Mar 2024 · 5 MW · 1 9 Mar 2024 · 8 MW · 2 13 Mar 2024 · 265 MW · 18 14 Mar 2024 · 43 MW · 7 15 Mar 2024 · 43 MW · 3 16 Mar 2024 · 27 MW · 4 17 Mar 2024 · 37 MW · 5
7 Mar 9 Mar 13 Mar 14 Mar 15 Mar 16 Mar 17 Mar

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

This area had burned before

49% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 48 ha in 2016, 236 ha in 2018, 37 ha in 2019, 502 ha in 2020, 606 ha in 2021. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 796 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1% of the area of London (16 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. Mansabá where it started
    1,644 ha reached on 7 Mar
    1.3 %

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.

Before · 29 Feb 2024
After · 24 Mar 2024

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 9 March 2024 the air beside the fire reached 76 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 48: 3.2 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak76 µg/m³
Days over the guideline16 days
PM10150 µg/m³
Optical depth0.50
567891011121314151617181920
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 · 40Every 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 Guinea-Bissau ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Mansabá fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 7 March 2024 to 17 March 2024 (11 days). The perimeter dates it from 13 March 2024 to 17 March 2024.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 1,634 hectares (16.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Mansabá (1,644 ha, 1.3 %).
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Guinea-Bissau (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.

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.

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How we know this
  • Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
  • Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 13 March 2024 to 17 March 2024. 40 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.

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 (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.