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North Gonja fire, 6 December 2022 North Gonja

Out · last detection 16 Dec 2022, 01:43 UTC

The fire started on 6 December 2022 in North Gonja, Ghana, and satellites saw it burning for 13 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 3,141 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 117th largest in Savannah since 2016 (of 335 with a page). Number 38 in Ghana in 2022, of 118.

Compare with…

Suggestions: North Gonja · 2018North Gonja · 2021North Gonja · 2017North Gonja · 2021

Burnt area
3,141ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
13days
6 Dec 2022 – 18 Dec 2022
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
6 Dec
2022
Heat detections
75
in a single hotspot: 84 MW
Danger at start
31
High · FWI index
Average daily power
178MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 6 Dec18 Dec
16 Dec 2022

How it evolved, day by day

6 Dec 2022 · 77 MW · 6 8 Dec 2022 · 33 MW · 9 9 Dec 2022 · 634 MW · 32 10 Dec 2022 · 359 MW · 12 12 Dec 2022 · 466 MW · 10 13 Dec 2022 · 19 MW · 3 14 Dec 2022 · 5 MW · 1 15 Dec 2022 · 11 MW · 1 16 Dec 2022 · 1 MW · 1
6 Dec 9 Dec 12 Dec 14 Dec 16 Dec

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

The weather it burned in

37°high
32km/h · peak gust
14%lowest humidity

It had gone 2 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

79% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 393 ha in 2017, 1,742 ha in 2018, 116 ha in 2020, 1,538 ha in 2021. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 2,477 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 2% of the area of London (31 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. North Gonja where it started
    3,161 ha reached on 6 Dec
    0.6 %

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 2020
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2020, 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.

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 Rain Danger (FWI)
6 Dec 37.0 °C 25 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
7 Dec 34.2 °C 20 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
8 Dec 34.8 °C 22 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
9 Dec 34.9 °C 25 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
10 Dec 34.4 °C 16 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
11 Dec 34.0 °C 14 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
12 Dec 35.1 °C 14 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
13 Dec 34.9 °C 19 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
14 Dec 35.6 °C 17 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
15 Dec 34.7 °C 15 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
16 Dec 34.4 °C 16 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
17 Dec 35.2 °C 18 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
18 Dec 34.2 °C 20 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
19 Dec after 34.6 °C 18 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
20 Dec after 32.8 °C 18 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
21 Dec after 32.3 °C 17 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
22 Dec after 31.7 °C 21 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
23 Dec after 30.6 °C 20 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
24 Dec after 30.3 °C 19 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 29 Nov 2022
After · 25 Dec 2022

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 13 December 2022 the air beside the fire reached 214 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 110: 7.3 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak214 µg/m³
Days over the guideline12 days
PM10311 µg/m³
Optical depth0.95
4567891011121314151617
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 · 75Every 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 Ghana ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the North Gonja fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 6 December 2022 to 18 December 2022 (13 days). The perimeter dates it from 6 December 2022 to 14 December 2022.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 3,141 hectares (31.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered North Gonja (3,161 ha, 0.6 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 37.0 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 32 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 40, class Very high.
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

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: 14 December 2022 → 18 December 2022.

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.

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 6 December 2022 to 14 December 2022. 75 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 2020, 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.