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SN · Senegal · –

Missira fire, 10 February 2026 Missira

Out · last detection 19 Feb 2026, 15:08 UTC

The fire started on 10 February 2026 in Missira, Senegal, and satellites saw it burning for 11 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 3,371 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 52 in Senegal in 2026, of 135.

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 (21.1 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.

Burnt area
3,371ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
11days
10 Feb 2026 – 20 Feb 2026
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
10 Feb
2026
Heat detections
109
in a single hotspot: 21 MW
Danger at start
56
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
52MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 10 Feb20 Feb
19 Feb 2026

How it evolved, day by day

10 Feb 2026 · 9 MW · 1 11 Feb 2026 · 0 MW · 1 12 Feb 2026 · 12 MW · 2 13 Feb 2026 · 53 MW · 18 14 Feb 2026 · 72 MW · 14 15 Feb 2026 · 78 MW · 14 16 Feb 2026 · 44 MW · 15 17 Feb 2026 · 51 MW · 14 18 Feb 2026 · 47 MW · 10 19 Feb 2026 · 149 MW · 20
10 Feb 12 Feb 14 Feb 16 Feb 19 Feb

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

The weather it burned in

42°high
38km/h · peak gust
6%lowest humidity

It had gone 32 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

94% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,044 ha in 2016, 1,435 ha in 2020, 691 ha in 2021, 1,451 ha in 2022, 521 ha in 2023, 1,536 ha in 2024, 386 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 3,165 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 2.1% of the area of London (34 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
    3,391 ha reached on 10 Feb
    0.4 %

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

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)
10 Feb 39.2 °C 10 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
11 Feb 40.2 °C 13 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
12 Feb 40.7 °C 10 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
13 Feb 41.7 °C 12 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
14 Feb 39.8 °C 13 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
15 Feb 40.1 °C 10 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
16 Feb 39.0 °C 10 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
17 Feb 38.9 °C 6 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
18 Feb 39.0 °C 12 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
19 Feb 40.4 °C 10 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
20 Feb 40.2 °C 13 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
21 Feb after 39.7 °C 14 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
22 Feb after 40.8 °C 12 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
23 Feb after 39.6 °C 13 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
24 Feb after 39.0 °C 15 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
25 Feb after 40.0 °C 12 % 19 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
26 Feb after 40.2 °C 14 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
27 Feb after 38.0 °C 14 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
28 Feb after 34.2 °C 21 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
1 Mar after 34.9 °C 13 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
2 Mar after 35.2 °C 18 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 3 Feb 2026
After · 27 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 16 February 2026 the air beside the fire reached 157 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 100: 6.6 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak157 µg/m³
Days over the guideline14 days
PM10572 µg/m³
Optical depth0.88
10 Feb13 Feb16 Feb19 Feb22 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 · 109Every 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?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 10 February 2026 to 20 February 2026 (11 days). The perimeter dates it from 12 February 2026 to 20 February 2026.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 3,371 hectares (33.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Missira (3,391 ha, 0.4 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 41.7 °C, humidity dropped to 6 % and gusts hit 38 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 65, 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Start date: 12 February 2026 → 10 February 2026.

RSS Changes to this page With cross-checks and a citable version

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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 12 February 2026 to 20 February 2026. 109 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.