Skip to content
worldfires
ML · Mali · –

Niantjila fire, February 2026 Niantjila

Out · last detection 19 Feb 2026, 02:20 UTC

The fire started on 11 February 2026 in Niantjila, Mali, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,069 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 156 in Mali in 2026, of 168.

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 (10.4 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: Wola · 2016

Burnt area
2,069ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
9days
11 Feb 2026 – 19 Feb 2026
Municipalities hit
1
communes
Started on
11 Feb
2026
Heat detections
53
in a single hotspot: 10 MW
Danger at start
52
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
19MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 11 Feb19 Feb
19 Feb 2026

How it evolved, day by day

11 Feb 2026 · 5 MW · 4 12 Feb 2026 · 39 MW · 13 13 Feb 2026 · 38 MW · 8 14 Feb 2026 · 42 MW · 21 15 Feb 2026 · 7 MW · 4 16 Feb 2026 · 1 MW · 1 19 Feb 2026 · 2 MW · 2
11 Feb 14 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

38°high
41km/h · peak gust
7%lowest humidity

It had gone 57 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

46% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 953 ha in 2024.

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. Niantjila where it started
    2,082 ha reached on 11 Feb
    5.4 %

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: 73 % of the area in Mali

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
11 Feb 37.8 °C 10 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
12 Feb 38.2 °C 9 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
13 Feb 38.5 °C 10 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
14 Feb 38.1 °C 10 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
15 Feb 37.2 °C 11 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
16 Feb 34.7 °C 10 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 66
17 Feb 34.2 °C 7 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
18 Feb 35.4 °C 8 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
19 Feb 36.1 °C 8 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
20 Feb after 36.8 °C 9 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 64
21 Feb after 36.4 °C 8 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 64
22 Feb after 36.4 °C 9 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
23 Feb after 36.6 °C 9 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
24 Feb after 36.9 °C 9 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
25 Feb after 37.1 °C 11 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
26 Feb after 36.3 °C 11 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 68
27 Feb after 35.6 °C 21 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
28 Feb after 33.0 °C 35 % 34 km/h 0.7 mm High 32
1 Mar after 32.7 °C 19 % 27 km/h 0.1 mm Very high 40

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 4 Feb 2026
After · 26 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 17 February 2026 the air beside the fire reached 125 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 100: 6.7 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak125 µg/m³
Days over the guideline11 days
PM10594 µg/m³
Optical depth0.76
9 Feb12 Feb15 Feb18 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 · 53Every 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 Mali

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Niantjila fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 11 February 2026 to 19 February 2026 (9 days). The perimeter dates it from 11 February 2026 to 16 February 2026.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 2,069 hectares (20.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Niantjila (2,082 ha, 5.4 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 38.5 °C, humidity dropped to 7 % and gusts hit 41 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 66, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Mali (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.

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. Last day with fire: 16 February 2026 → 19 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.

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 11 February 2026 to 16 February 2026. 53 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 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.