How long did the Mion fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 19 January 2026 and 27 January 2026: 9 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 2,038 hectares (20.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Mion (2,052 ha, 0.8 %).

Where does this data come from?

From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Ghana (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

GH · Ghana · 2026-01-19 → 2026-01-27

Mion fire, 19 January 2026 Mion

Out · last detection 28 Jan 2026, 13:38 UTC

The fire started on 19 January 2026 in Mion, Ghana, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,038 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 251th largest in Northern Region since 2016 (of 262 with a page). Number 177 in Ghana in 2026, of 179.

The power measured by the satellite is low (20.3 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…

Suggestions: Gushegu · 2022 Mion · 2022 Gushegu · 2020 Mion · 2026

Burnt area: 2,038ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 9days; 19 Jan 2026 – 27 Jan 2026
Municipalities hit: 1; districts
Started on: 19 Jan; 2026
Heat detections: 38; in a single hotspot: 20 MW
Average daily power: 19MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 19 Jan27 Jan

Play back 28 Jan 2026

How it evolved, day by day

19 Jan 21 Jan 24 Jan 25 Jan 27 Jan

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

This area had burned before

98% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1 ha in 2016, 3 ha in 2017, 1,095 ha in 2018, 541 ha in 2019, 84 ha in 2020, 1,182 ha in 2021, 542 ha in 2022, 67 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 2,006 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 1.3% of the area of London (20 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

Mion where it started

2,052 ha reached on 19 Jan

0.8 %

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 area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (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

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 12 Jan 2026

After · 3 Feb 2026

Before After

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 17 January 2026 the air beside the fire reached 119 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 93: 6.2 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak119 µg/m³

Days over the guideline14 days

PM10454 µg/m³

Optical depth1.14

WHO 15

1718192021222324252627282930

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 · 38Every 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

All fires in Ghana ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Mion fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 19 January 2026 and 27 January 2026: 9 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 2,038 hectares (20.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Mion (2,052 ha, 0.8 %).
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Ghana (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.

Emergency number: 112 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

Satellite cross-check

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

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.

Report an error

What do you think is wrong?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

What really happened?

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We will only use your email to reply about this report. Privacy. This is not an emergency service: if there is a fire now, call 112.

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. 38 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
We have not matched this page with any official record.
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 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.

Where it burned