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LA · Laos · –

Park Ou fire, 23 March 2026 Park Ou

Out · last detection 9 Apr 2026, 18:55 UTC

The fire started on 23 March 2026 in Park Ou, Laos, and satellites saw it burning for 18 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,604 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 203 in Laos in 2026, of 308.

GWIS near-real-time perimeter, from the layer that changed in October 2025: this fire is not compared with fires from earlier years, because since then the GWIS layer gives more and larger perimeters.

Compare with…
Burnt area
2,604ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
18days
23 Mar 2026 – 9 Apr 2026
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
23 Mar
2026
Heat detections
42
in a single hotspot: 77 MW
Danger at start
16
Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power
55MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 23 Mar9 Apr
9 Apr 2026

How it evolved, day by day

24 Mar 2026 · 45 MW · 4 25 Mar 2026 · 28 MW · 1 26 Mar 2026 · 10 MW · 1 28 Mar 2026 · 30 MW · 4 29 Mar 2026 · 67 MW · 5 30 Mar 2026 · 186 MW · 11 31 Mar 2026 · 170 MW · 6 1 Apr 2026 · 31 MW · 4 3 Apr 2026 · 80 MW · 3 6 Apr 2026 · 1 MW · 1 7 Apr 2026 · 8 MW · 1 9 Apr 2026 · 3 MW · 1
24 Mar 30 Mar 6 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

36°high
50km/h · peak gust
31%lowest humidity

It had gone 9 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 3.2 mm on 19 Apr.

This area had burned before

100% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,359 ha in 2016, 1,697 ha in 2017, 1,881 ha in 2018, 1,964 ha in 2019, 1,737 ha in 2020, 404 ha in 2021, 2,080 ha in 2022, 1,276 ha in 2023, 868 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 2,595 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1.6% of the area of London (26 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. Park Ou where it started
    2,617 ha reached on 24 Mar
    3.0 %

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 area0.17 ha
Residents≈ 300

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.17 hectares of built-up land and about 300 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)
23 Mar 33.7 °C 33 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 16
24 Mar 34.1 °C 31 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 17
25 Mar 33.1 °C 38 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
26 Mar 34.8 °C 33 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
27 Mar 34.3 °C 34 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
28 Mar 34.9 °C 32 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
29 Mar 33.0 °C 38 % 50 km/h 0.4 mm High 23
30 Mar 34.0 °C 35 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
31 Mar 34.2 °C 35 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
1 Apr 33.8 °C 40 % 30 km/h 0.1 mm Moderate 21
2 Apr 33.3 °C 43 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
3 Apr 35.9 °C 34 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
4 Apr 35.3 °C 36 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
5 Apr 34.3 °C 40 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
6 Apr 34.7 °C 41 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
7 Apr 35.1 °C 38 % 35 km/h 0.1 mm High 24
8 Apr 35.5 °C 35 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
9 Apr 35.4 °C 32 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
10 Apr after 35.1 °C 31 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
11 Apr after 34.8 °C 34 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
12 Apr after 35.5 °C 27 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
13 Apr after 36.4 °C 32 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
14 Apr after 34.9 °C 38 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
15 Apr after 35.2 °C 37 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
16 Apr after 36.5 °C 28 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
17 Apr after 36.3 °C 33 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
18 Apr after 32.2 °C 49 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
19 Apr after 30.6 °C 64 % 37 km/h 3.2 mm Very low 5

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 16 Mar 2026
After · 16 Apr 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 7 April 2026 the air beside the fire reached 178 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 129: 8.6 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak178 µg/m³
Days over the guideline22 days
PM10193 µg/m³
Optical depth2.73
22 Mar27 Mar1 Apr6 Apr11 Apr
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 · 42Every 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 Laos

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Park Ou fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 23 March 2026 to 9 April 2026 (18 days). The perimeter dates it from 26 March 2026 to 3 April 2026.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 2,604 hectares (26.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Park Ou (2,617 ha, 3.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 35.9 °C, humidity dropped to 31 % and gusts hit 50 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 26, class High.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Laos (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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Start date: 24 March 2026 → 23 March 2026.

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
  • Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
  • Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 26 March 2026 to 3 April 2026. 42 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 ADM2 (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.