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SN · Senegal · –

Missira fire, 30 January 2026 Missira, Dianké Makan

Out · last detection 31 Jan 2026, 14:24 UTC

The fire started on 30 January 2026 in Missira, Senegal, and satellites saw it burning for 2 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,359 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

Number 102 in Senegal in 2026, of 139.

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.

Burnt area
2,359ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
2days
30 Jan 2026 – 31 Jan 2026
Municipalities hit
2
districts
Started on
30 Jan
2026
Heat detections
72
in a single hotspot: 260 MW
Danger at start
58
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
1.5GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 30 Jan31 Jan
31 Jan 2026

How it evolved, day by day

30 Jan 2026 · 2,729 MW · 29 31 Jan 2026 · 324 MW · 43
30 Jan 31 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

40°high
34km/h · peak gust
10%lowest humidity

It had gone 21 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

100% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,192 ha in 2017, 1,413 ha in 2018, 1,501 ha in 2020, 1,026 ha in 2021, 1,355 ha in 2022, 1,275 ha in 2023, 1,112 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 2,353 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1.5% of the area of London (24 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. Missira where it started
    2,046 ha reached on 30 Jan
    0.2 %
  2. 328 ha reached on 31 Jan
    0.1 %

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 area0.10 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.10 hectares of 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

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)

Started with Very dry air: 43 % of the area in Senegal

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
30 Jan 39.7 °C 11 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
31 Jan 40.3 °C 10 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
1 Feb after 38.8 °C 15 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
2 Feb after 39.1 °C 13 % 20 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
3 Feb after 40.0 °C 14 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
4 Feb after 32.1 °C 26 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
5 Feb after 36.9 °C 24 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
6 Feb after 37.5 °C 18 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
7 Feb after 40.4 °C 17 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
8 Feb after 39.1 °C 14 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
9 Feb after 39.1 °C 11 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
10 Feb after 39.4 °C 10 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 23 Jan 2026
After · 7 Feb 2026

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 1 February 2026 the air beside the fire reached 94 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 70: 4.6 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak94 µg/m³
Days over the guideline7 days
PM10353 µg/m³
Optical depth0.53
28 Jan30 Jan1 Feb3 Feb
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 · 72Every 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 Senegal

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Missira fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 30 January 2026 and 31 January 2026: 2 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 2,359 hectares (23.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Missira (2,046 ha, 0.2 %); Dianké Makan (328 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 40.3 °C, humidity dropped to 10 % and gusts hit 34 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 59, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Senegal (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: 18 · 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.

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?

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 18.

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. 72 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 ADM3 (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY 3.0 IGO)). 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.