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NG · Nigeria · –

Monguno fire, November 2026 Monguno, Nganzai

Burning · last detection 5 Nov 2026, 11:59 UTC

The fire started on 4 November 2026 in Monguno, Nigeria, and satellites saw it burning for 2 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,102 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

Number 293 in Nigeria in 2026, of 319.

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.

Is it still active?

Satellites detected fire on 5 Nov 2026, 11:59 UTC. Everything suggests it is still burning. Satellites pass a few times a day and cloud or smoke can hide the fire: a lack of detections is not an official extinction. Each country’s emergency service declares a fire contained or out.

Burnt area
2,102ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
2days
4 Nov 2026 – 5 Nov 2026
Municipalities hit
2
local government areas
Started on
4 Nov
2026
Heat detections
31
in a single hotspot: 68 MW
Danger at start
71
Very extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
254MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 4 Nov5 Nov
5 Nov 2026

How it evolved, day by day

4 Nov 2026 · 499 MW · 25 5 Nov 2026 · 9 MW · 6
4 Nov 5 Nov

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
42km/h · peak gust
9%lowest humidity

It had gone 29 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

86% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 421 ha in 2016, 1,048 ha in 2017, 210 ha in 2018, 125 ha in 2019, 366 ha in 2020, 19 ha in 2021, 59 ha in 2022, 999 ha in 2023, 155 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,804 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1.3% of the area of London (21 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. Monguno where it started
    1,563 ha reached on 4 Nov
    0.7 %
  2. 552 ha reached on 4 Nov
    0.3 %

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) · forecast models, provisional until the ERA5 reanalysis arrives

Started with Very dry air: 28 % of the area in Nigeria

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
4 Nov 40.0 °C 9 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 71
5 Nov 38.5 °C 11 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 84

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 28 Oct 2026
After · 4 Nov 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 3 November 2026 the air beside the fire reached 42 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 30: 2.0 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak42 µg/m³
Days over the guideline3 days
PM10111 µg/m³
Optical depth0.32
234
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 · 31Every 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 Nigeria

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Monguno fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 4 November 2026 to 5 November 2026 (2 days). The perimeter dates it from 4 November 2026 to 4 November 2026.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 2,102 hectares (21.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Monguno (1,563 ha, 0.7 %); Nganzai (552 ha, 0.3 %).
Is the Monguno fire still active?
Yes: satellites detected fire on 5 Nov 2026, 11:59 UTC. Check the emergency service for the official status.
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 40.0 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 42 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 84, class Very extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Nigeria (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

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 5 November 2026.
  1. Page published (2,102 ha).

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 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 4 November 2026 to 4 November 2026. 31 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.
  • Weather: ECMWF IFS model, provisional until the ERA5 reanalysis arrives.

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.