How long did the Mion fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 12 January 2026 to 30 January 2026 (19 days). The perimeter dates it from 19 January 2026 to 28 January 2026.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,795 hectares (68.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Mion (6,837 ha, 2.5 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 36.2 °C, humidity dropped to 13 % and gusts hit 38 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 53, class Extreme.

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 · 2026-01-12 → 2026-01-30

Mion fire, 12 January 2026 Mion

Out · last detection 27 Jan 2026, 13:57 UTC

The fire started on 12 January 2026 in Mion, Ghana, and satellites saw it burning for 19 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,795 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 13th largest in Northern Region since 2016 (of 262 with a page). Number 21 in Ghana in 2026, of 161.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Mion · 2025 North East Gonja · 2026 Gushegu · 2026 Gushegu · 2018

Burnt area: 6,795ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 19days; 12 Jan 2026 – 30 Jan 2026
Municipalities hit: 1; districts
Started on: 12 Jan; 2026
Heat detections: 199; in a single hotspot: 68 MW
Danger at start: 40; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 175MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 12 Jan30 Jan

Play back 27 Jan 2026

How it evolved, day by day

13 Jan 16 Jan 19 Jan 22 Jan 24 Jan 25 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

38km/h · peak gust

13%lowest humidity

It had gone 50 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

50% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 312 ha in 2016, 627 ha in 2017, 1,076 ha in 2018, 1,980 ha in 2019, 2,940 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 3,425 ha that had burned before.

2,160 ha Mion fire, January 2025 2,593 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 4.3% of the area of London (68 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

6,837 ha reached on 13 Jan

2.5 %

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 area3.8 ha

Residents≈ 550

Inside the perimeter there were about 3.8 hectares of built-up land and about 550 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	Danger (FWI)
19 Jan	36.0 °C	20 %	24 km/h	Very high 40
20 Jan	35.2 °C	18 %	28 km/h	Very high 42
21 Jan	33.4 °C	22 %	36 km/h	Very high 47
22 Jan	33.8 °C	19 %	37 km/h	Very high 49
23 Jan	34.5 °C	15 %	36 km/h	Very high 47
24 Jan	35.5 °C	14 %	28 km/h	Very high 45
25 Jan	35.7 °C	13 %	38 km/h	Extreme 52
26 Jan	35.3 °C	13 %	38 km/h	Extreme 53
27 Jan	36.1 °C	14 %	30 km/h	Very high 47
28 Jan	36.2 °C	16 %	30 km/h	Very high 47
29 Jan	36.0 °C	16 %	30 km/h	Very high 49
30 Jan	37.3 °C	14 %	28 km/h	Very high 49
31 Jan after	36.8 °C	21 %	20 km/h	Very high 45
1 Feb after	37.1 °C	21 %	26 km/h	Very high 45
2 Feb after	37.7 °C	29 %	23 km/h	Very high 39
3 Feb after	35.3 °C	33 %	26 km/h	High 37
4 Feb after	38.2 °C	21 %	28 km/h	Very high 43
5 Feb after	38.8 °C	15 %	28 km/h	Very high 48
6 Feb after	36.8 °C	30 %	29 km/h	Very high 42
7 Feb after	37.0 °C	33 %	29 km/h	Very high 39

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 5 Jan 2026

After · 6 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 28 January 2026 the air beside the fire reached 128 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 96: 6.4 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak128 µg/m³

Days over the guideline15 days

PM10475 µg/m³

Optical depth1.28

WHO 15

171819202122232425262728293031

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 · 199Every 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?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 12 January 2026 to 30 January 2026 (19 days). The perimeter dates it from 19 January 2026 to 28 January 2026.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,795 hectares (68.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Mion (6,837 ha, 2.5 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 36.2 °C, humidity dropped to 13 % and gusts hit 38 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 53, class Extreme.
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.

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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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 19 January 2026 to 28 January 2026. 199 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.

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