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Ose fire, January 2022 Ose

Out · last detection 2 Feb 2022, 13:31 UTC

The fire started on 29 January 2022 in Ose, Nigeria, and satellites saw it burning for 5 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,654 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 17th largest in Ondo since 2016 (of 23 with a page). Number 65 in Nigeria in 2022, of 125.

Compare with…
Burnt area
2,654ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
5days
29 Jan 2022 – 2 Feb 2022
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
29 Jan
2022
Heat detections
105
in a single hotspot: 56 MW
Danger at start
43
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
188MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 29 Jan2 Feb
2 Feb 2022

How it evolved, day by day

29 Jan 2022 · 61 MW · 8 30 Jan 2022 · 76 MW · 12 31 Jan 2022 · 628 MW · 37 1 Feb 2022 · 17 MW · 10 2 Feb 2022 · 157 MW · 18
29 Jan 30 Jan 31 Jan 1 Feb 2 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

37°high
38km/h · peak gust
13%lowest humidity

It had gone 10 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

64% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 25 ha in 2016, 1,187 ha in 2017, 862 ha in 2020. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,707 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1.7% of the area of London (27 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. Ose where it started
    2,671 ha reached on 23 Jan
    1.8 %

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 area20 ha
Residents≈ 4,000

Inside the perimeter there were about 20 hectares of built-up land and about 4,000 residents (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)
29 Jan 36.5 °C 15 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
30 Jan 35.9 °C 17 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
31 Jan 37.0 °C 13 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
1 Feb 35.1 °C 19 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
2 Feb 36.5 °C 16 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
3 Feb after 34.9 °C 31 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
4 Feb after 35.2 °C 33 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
5 Feb after 36.1 °C 17 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
6 Feb after 36.0 °C 16 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
7 Feb after 36.4 °C 24 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
8 Feb after 36.0 °C 32 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
9 Feb after 37.9 °C 25 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
10 Feb after 38.2 °C 24 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
11 Feb after 38.7 °C 16 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
12 Feb after 36.8 °C 31 % 26 km/h 0.5 mm Very high 39

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 22 Jan 2022
After · 9 Feb 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.

Detections table · 105Every 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 Ose fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 29 January 2022 and 2 February 2022: 5 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 2,654 hectares (26.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Ose (2,671 ha, 1.8 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 37.0 °C, humidity dropped to 13 % and gusts hit 38 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 46, class Very high.
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 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

No changes since 24 October 2026.

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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 105 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.