How long did the Padaung fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 26 March 2026 and 8 April 2026: 14 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 5,300 hectares (53.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Padaung (5,329 ha, 2.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 38.1 °C, humidity dropped to 29 % and gusts hit 46 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 38, class High.

Where does this data come from?

From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Myanmar (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

MM · Myanmar · 2026-03-26 → 2026-04-08

Padaung fire, 26 March 2026 Padaung

Out · last detection 8 Apr 2026, 19:14 UTC

The fire started on 26 March 2026 in Padaung, Myanmar, and satellites saw it burning for 14 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,300 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 11th largest in Bago since 2016 (of 81 with a page). Number 126 in Myanmar in 2026, of 480.

The power measured by the satellite is low (16.0 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: Padaung · 2026 Padaung · 2026 Padaung · 2026 Padaung · 2026

Burnt area: 5,300ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 14days; 26 Mar 2026 – 8 Apr 2026
Municipalities hit: 1; municipalities
Started on: 26 Mar; 2026
Heat detections: 176; in a single hotspot: 16 MW
Danger at start: 31; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 48MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 26 Mar8 Apr

Play back 8 Apr 2026

How it evolved, day by day

27 Mar 29 Mar 31 Mar 2 Apr 4 Apr 7 Apr

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

46km/h · peak gust

29%lowest humidity

It had gone 33 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

24% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,252 ha in 2025.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 3.3% of the area of London (53 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

Padaung where it started

5,329 ha reached on 27 Mar

2.1 %

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≈ 30

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.09 hectares of built-up land and about 30 residents (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)

Day	High	Min. humidity	Peak gust	Rain	Danger (FWI)
26 Mar	37.0 °C	34 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
27 Mar	36.8 °C	33 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
28 Mar	36.4 °C	34 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
29 Mar	36.5 °C	32 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
30 Mar	37.3 °C	29 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
31 Mar	37.0 °C	36 %	35 km/h	0.1 mm	High 35
1 Apr	36.8 °C	30 %	40 km/h	0.1 mm	High 36
2 Apr	37.4 °C	35 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	High 38
3 Apr	38.1 °C	35 %	39 km/h	0.1 mm	High 38
4 Apr	36.5 °C	40 %	38 km/h	0.3 mm	High 34
5 Apr	34.9 °C	48 %	45 km/h	0.2 mm	High 32
6 Apr	35.1 °C	47 %	46 km/h	0.7 mm	High 28
7 Apr	32.5 °C	51 %	39 km/h	0.6 mm	High 23
8 Apr	32.2 °C	49 %	37 km/h	1.8 mm	Moderate 12
9 Apr after	34.3 °C	42 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
10 Apr after	32.9 °C	54 %	41 km/h	0.2 mm	High 25
11 Apr after	35.7 °C	33 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
12 Apr after	36.1 °C	38 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
13 Apr after	37.0 °C	38 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
14 Apr after	36.2 °C	41 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
15 Apr after	35.5 °C	43 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
16 Apr after	36.0 °C	43 %	28 km/h	0.1 mm	High 30
17 Apr after	36.5 °C	41 %	35 km/h	0.6 mm	High 27
18 Apr after	37.2 °C	37 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 19 Mar 2026

After · 15 Apr 2026

Before After

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 6 April 2026 the air beside the fire reached 57 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 46: 3.0 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak57 µg/m³

Days over the guideline18 days

PM1073 µg/m³

Optical depth1.04

WHO 15

24252627282930311234567891011

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 · 176Every 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 time	Satellite	FRP (MW)	Lat	Lon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Myanmar ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Padaung fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 26 March 2026 and 8 April 2026: 14 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 5,300 hectares (53.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Padaung (5,329 ha, 2.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 38.1 °C, humidity dropped to 29 % and gusts hit 46 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 38, class High.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Myanmar (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

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

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?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

What really happened?

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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. 176 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 (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.

Where it burned