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CG · Republic of the Congo · –

Mayama fire, 13 August 2025 Mayama

Out · last detection 18 Aug 2025, 12:46 UTC

The fire started on 13 August 2025 in Mayama, Republic of the Congo, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,244 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 42 in Republic of the Congo in 2025, of 73.

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 (9.8 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
1,244ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
6days
13 Aug 2025 – 18 Aug 2025
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
13 Aug
2025
Heat detections
37
in a single hotspot: 10 MW
Danger at start
15
Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power
29MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 13 Aug18 Aug
18 Aug 2025

How it evolved, day by day

13 Aug 2025 · 6 MW · 1 15 Aug 2025 · 42 MW · 10 16 Aug 2025 · 47 MW · 9 17 Aug 2025 · 38 MW · 13 18 Aug 2025 · 11 MW · 4
13 Aug 15 Aug 16 Aug 17 Aug 18 Aug

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

The weather it burned in

30°high
34km/h · peak gust
41%lowest humidity

It had gone 47 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

1% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 8 ha in 2020.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 0.8% of the area of London (12 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. Mayama where it started
    1,252 ha reached on 13 Aug
    0.2 %

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.

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)
13 Aug 25.3 °C 61 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 15
14 Aug 25.7 °C 58 % 34 km/h 0.1 mm Moderate 17
15 Aug 28.7 °C 46 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
16 Aug 28.9 °C 43 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
17 Aug 29.9 °C 41 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
18 Aug 28.9 °C 47 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
19 Aug after 29.3 °C 49 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
20 Aug after 23.8 °C 68 % 33 km/h 0.1 mm Moderate 16
21 Aug after 25.1 °C 64 % 36 km/h 0.6 mm Moderate 14
22 Aug after 26.2 °C 54 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 17
23 Aug after 26.7 °C 52 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
24 Aug after 26.3 °C 54 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
25 Aug after 29.6 °C 49 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
26 Aug after 27.9 °C 57 % 33 km/h 0.1 mm Moderate 20
27 Aug after 28.1 °C 53 % 33 km/h 0.1 mm Moderate 20
28 Aug after 28.8 °C 56 % 30 km/h 0.7 mm Moderate 16

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 6 Aug 2025
After · 25 Aug 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 12 August 2025 the air beside the fire reached 74 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 53: 3.5 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak74 µg/m³
Days over the guideline11 days
PM1075 µg/m³
Optical depth1.40
11 Aug14 Aug17 Aug20 Aug
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 · 37Every 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 Republic of the Congo

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Mayama fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 13 August 2025 and 18 August 2025: 6 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 1,244 hectares (12.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Mayama (1,252 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 29.9 °C, humidity dropped to 41 % and gusts hit 34 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 21, class Moderate.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Republic of the Congo (geoBoundaries ADM2). 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 · 1 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. 37 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.

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 (Map Library 2007, nombres de Wikidata) (Public Domain). 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.