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CF · Central African Republic · –

Ouandja fire, 29 October 2026 Ouandja

Out · last detection 8 Nov 2026, 12:42 UTC

Satellites first detected fire on 29 October 2026 in Ouandja, Central African Republic. It was active for 10 days, with 425 heat detections and an area with fire of about 5,530 hectares rebuilt from them, spread across a single municipality.

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.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Ouandja · 2026Ridina · 2021

GWIS (Copernicus) has not yet published the perimeter of this fire. It rebuilds it from hotspots, which can take several days, and it does not always arrive. For now the area is the one rebuilt from heat detections (about 14 hectares per pixel). If the perimeter arrives, this page picks it up on its own and keeps the same address.

Area with fire
≈ 5,530ha
rebuilt from hotspots, no official perimeter yet
Duration
10days
29 Oct 2026 – 7 Nov 2026
Municipalities hit
1
sub-prefectures
Started on
29 Oct
2026
Heat detections
425
in a single hotspot: 95 MW
Danger at start
65
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
450MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 29 Oct7 Nov
8 Nov 2026

How it evolved, day by day

29 Oct 2026 · 542 MW · 60 30 Oct 2026 · 452 MW · 60 31 Oct 2026 · 135 MW · 31 1 Nov 2026 · 523 MW · 81 2 Nov 2026 · 445 MW · 47 3 Nov 2026 · 443 MW · 35 4 Nov 2026 · 498 MW · 53 5 Nov 2026 · 224 MW · 22 6 Nov 2026 · 201 MW · 34 7 Nov 2026 · 1,040 MW · 63 8 Nov 2026 · 443 MW · 40
29 Oct 1 Nov 4 Nov 7 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

41°high
44km/h · peak gust
9%lowest humidity

It had gone 14 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

What happened to each town

  1. Ouandja where it started
    5,530 ha reached on 29 Oct
    0.3 %

Area with fire inside each municipality, rebuilt from heat detections (about 14 hectares per VIIRS pixel). An estimate until the official perimeter arrives. 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: 42 % of the area in Central African Republic

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
29 Oct 40.0 °C 12 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
30 Oct 39.5 °C 10 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 71
31 Oct 39.3 °C 11 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
1 Nov 39.7 °C 13 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 69
2 Nov 39.7 °C 14 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
3 Nov 40.1 °C 12 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 83
4 Nov 40.7 °C 9 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 71
5 Nov 39.9 °C 9 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 89
6 Nov 39.7 °C 11 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 75
7 Nov 38.5 °C 12 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 90
8 Nov after 36.5 °C 13 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 96
9 Nov after 37.1 °C 12 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 102
10 Nov after 37.2 °C 8 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 91

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 22 Oct 2026
After · 10 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 2 November 2026 the air beside the fire reached 50 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 36: 2.4 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak50 µg/m³
Days over the guideline12 days
PM10207 µg/m³
Optical depth0.55
24 Oct27 Oct30 Oct2 Nov
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 · 425Every 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 Central African Republic

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Ouandja fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite, it burned from 29 October 2026 to 7 November 2026 (10 days between the first and the last detection). There is no perimeter yet to date it.
How much area did it burn?
There is no perimeter yet. Heat detections rebuild about 5,530 hectares with fire (55.3 km²), a rough figure; GWIS will give its own when it publishes the perimeter, which can take several days.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Ouandja (5,530 ha, 0.3 %).
Is the Ouandja fire still active?
No fire detections since 8 Nov 2026, 12:42 UTC. A lack of detections is not an official extinction.
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 40.7 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 44 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 90, class Very extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Central African Republic (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 · 4 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 5 November 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 4 November 2026 → 7 November 2026.
  2. Start date: 27 October 2026 → 29 October 2026.
  3. Start date: 26 October 2026 → 27 October 2026.
  4. Page published (≈ 5,446 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.

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How we know this
  • No perimeter yet: the area (≈ 5,530 ha) is estimated by counting VIIRS pixels with fire, about 14 ha each.
  • Dates of the first and last VIIRS detection of the cluster. 425 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • 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 ADM3 (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY 3.0 IGO)). 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.