Nwoya fire, 8 January 2025 Nwoya
The fire started on 8 January 2025 in Nwoya, Uganda, and satellites saw it burning for 2 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,262 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 828th largest in Northern Region since 2016 (of 1377 with a page). Number 151 in Uganda in 2025, of 226.
The power measured by the satellite is low (24.2 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: Nwoya · 2024Nwoya · 2020Nwoya · 2019Nwoya · 2016
- Burnt area
- 1,262ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 2days
- 8 Jan 2025 – 9 Jan 2025
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- counties
- Started on
- 8 Jan
- 2025
- Heat detections
- 27
- in a single hotspot: 24 MW
- Average daily power
- 102MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
This area had burned before
100% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 984 ha in 2016, 23 ha in 2017, 626 ha in 2019, 786 ha in 2020, 50 ha in 2021, 327 ha in 2022, 813 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,271 ha that had burned before.
- 813 ha Nwoya fire, January 2024 1,117 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 786 ha Nwoya fire, January 2020 1,219 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 626 ha Nwoya fire, January 2019 1,389 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 558 ha Nwoya fire, February 2016 1,915 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 426 ha Nwoya fire, December 2016 3,137 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 327 ha Nwoya fire, January 2022 1,000 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 50 ha Nwoya fire, February 2021 1,395 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 23 ha Nwoya fire, January 2017 4,037 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
Nwoya where it started1,271 ha reached on 8 Jan0.3 %
Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance is from the town centre to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
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 · CopernicusOn 10 January 2025 the air beside the fire reached 60 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 49: 3.3 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
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 · 27Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 16,324 haNwoya6 January 2026 · 17 days · 13 km away
- 10,951 haNwoya28 January 2016 · 18 days · 18 km away
- 10,795 haBuliisa6 January 2019 · 9 days · 29 km away
- 9,718 haBuliisa3 January 2026 · 17 days · 29 km away
- 13,858 haKibanda9 February 2016 · 7 days · 31 km away
- 9,055 haBuliisa15 December 2016 · 16 days · 33 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Nwoya fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 8 January 2025 and 9 January 2025: 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 1,262 hectares (12.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Nwoya (1,271 ha, 0.3 %).
- Where does this data come from?
- From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Uganda (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: 999 · 112
Satellite cross-check
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
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. 27 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
- We have not matched this page with any official record.
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 (Public Domain). 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.