How long did the Sene East fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 23 December 2016 to 18 January 2017 (27 days). The perimeter dates it from 28 December 2016 to 12 January 2017.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 7,722 hectares (77.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Sene East (7,768 ha, 1.8 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 34.5 °C, humidity dropped to 26 % and gusts hit 28 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 30, class High.

Where does this data come from?

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

GH · Ghana · 2016-12-23 → 2017-01-18

Sene East fire, 23 December 2016 Sene East

Out · last detection 18 Jan 2017, 13:51 UTC

The fire started on 23 December 2016 in Sene East, Ghana, and satellites saw it burning for 27 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 7,722 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 23th largest in Bono East since 2016 (of 193 with a page). Number 11 in Ghana in 2016, of 122.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Sene East · 2016 Sene East · 2026 Sene East · 2024 Sene East · 2017

Burnt area: 7,722ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 27days; 23 Dec 2016 – 18 Jan 2017
Municipalities hit: 1; districts
Started on: 23 Dec; 2016
Heat detections: 302; in a single hotspot: 82 MW
Danger at start: 25; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 96MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 23 Dec18 Jan

Play back 18 Jan 2017

How it evolved, day by day

23 Dec 28 Dec 1 Jan 3 Jan 5 Jan 10 Jan 14 Jan

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

34°high

28km/h · peak gust

26%lowest humidity

It had gone 10 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 7.6 mm on 22 Jan.

This area had burned before

11% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 845 ha in 2016.

685 ha Sene East fire, January 2016 3,948 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 4.9% of the area of London (77 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

Sene East where it started

7,768 ha reached on 23 Dec

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 2015

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2015, 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)
28 Dec	31.8 °C	29 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
29 Dec	31.9 °C	32 %	25 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
30 Dec	32.4 °C	36 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
31 Dec	33.6 °C	36 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
1 Jan	33.6 °C	35 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
2 Jan	33.6 °C	34 %	25 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
3 Jan	33.8 °C	35 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
4 Jan	33.7 °C	26 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
5 Jan	34.3 °C	33 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
6 Jan	33.8 °C	30 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
7 Jan	33.8 °C	46 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
8 Jan	33.8 °C	42 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
9 Jan	34.0 °C	33 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
10 Jan	32.6 °C	41 %	22 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
11 Jan	34.5 °C	41 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
12 Jan	32.7 °C	53 %	23 km/h	0.4 mm	High 22
13 Jan	34.1 °C	31 %	25 km/h	0.3 mm	High 26
14 Jan	32.3 °C	22 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
15 Jan	33.3 °C	18 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
16 Jan	33.6 °C	30 %	22 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
17 Jan	34.7 °C	26 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
18 Jan	35.9 °C	34 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	High 38
19 Jan after	34.7 °C	45 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	High 29
20 Jan after	35.4 °C	41 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
21 Jan after	36.1 °C	39 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
22 Jan after	35.4 °C	41 %	30 km/h	7.6 mm	Low 8

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 16 Dec 2016

After · 25 Jan 2017

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.

Detections table · 302Every 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 Ghana ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Sene East fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 23 December 2016 to 18 January 2017 (27 days). The perimeter dates it from 28 December 2016 to 12 January 2017.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 7,722 hectares (77.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Sene East (7,768 ha, 1.8 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 34.5 °C, humidity dropped to 26 % and gusts hit 28 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 30, class High.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Ghana (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

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.

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What really happened?

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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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 28 December 2016 to 12 January 2017. 302 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 2015, 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.

Where it burned