How long did the Shadaw fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 12 February 2020 to 2 March 2020 (20 days). The perimeter dates it from 12 February 2020 to 24 February 2020.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,061 hectares (60.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Shadaw (6,088 ha, 2.8 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 35.9 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 39 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 · 2020-02-12 → 2020-03-02

Shadaw fire, 12 February 2020 Shadaw

Out · last detection 2 Mar 2020, 18:41 UTC

The fire started on 12 February 2020 in Shadaw, Myanmar, and satellites saw it burning for 20 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,061 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 44th largest in Kayah since 2016 (of 209 with a page). Number 26 in Myanmar in 2020, of 232.

The power measured by the satellite is low (19.7 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: Shadaw · 2019 Shadaw · 2019 Shadaw · 2023 Shadaw · 2026

Burnt area: 6,061ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 20days; 12 Feb 2020 – 2 Mar 2020
Municipalities hit: 1; municipalities
Started on: 12 Feb; 2020
Heat detections: 274; in a single hotspot: 20 MW
Danger at start: 35; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 39MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 12 Feb2 Mar

Play back 2 Mar 2020

How it evolved, day by day

12 Feb 15 Feb 18 Feb 21 Feb 24 Feb 27 Feb 1 Mar

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

39km/h · peak gust

20%lowest humidity

It had gone 44 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

45% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 461 ha in 2016, 4 ha in 2017, 2,431 ha in 2019. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 2,709 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 3.8% of the area of London (61 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

Shadaw where it started

6,088 ha reached on 12 Feb

2.8 %

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 area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (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	Danger (FWI)
12 Feb	34.1 °C	21 %	32 km/h	High 35
13 Feb	33.8 °C	20 %	39 km/h	High 38
14 Feb	32.8 °C	22 %	38 km/h	High 38
15 Feb	32.9 °C	31 %	25 km/h	High 33
16 Feb	33.3 °C	27 %	22 km/h	High 32
17 Feb	34.3 °C	24 %	32 km/h	High 34
18 Feb	33.8 °C	32 %	38 km/h	High 35
19 Feb	34.1 °C	30 %	30 km/h	High 33
20 Feb	34.3 °C	29 %	30 km/h	High 33
21 Feb	33.8 °C	35 %	26 km/h	High 30
22 Feb	34.2 °C	34 %	25 km/h	High 31
23 Feb	32.2 °C	34 %	31 km/h	High 32
24 Feb	33.1 °C	36 %	29 km/h	High 31
25 Feb	34.4 °C	27 %	28 km/h	High 32
26 Feb	33.7 °C	32 %	35 km/h	High 33
27 Feb	32.7 °C	32 %	30 km/h	High 32
28 Feb	33.6 °C	31 %	34 km/h	High 34
29 Feb	35.1 °C	25 %	32 km/h	High 34
1 Mar	35.7 °C	26 %	28 km/h	High 33
2 Mar	35.9 °C	25 %	31 km/h	High 35
3 Mar after	34.7 °C	30 %	40 km/h	Very high 38
4 Mar after	35.1 °C	27 %	30 km/h	High 35
5 Mar after	35.1 °C	25 %	34 km/h	High 36
6 Mar after	36.0 °C	25 %	35 km/h	High 36
7 Mar after	36.6 °C	26 %	29 km/h	High 36
8 Mar after	36.3 °C	24 %	36 km/h	High 38
9 Mar after	36.8 °C	22 %	33 km/h	Very high 38
10 Mar after	36.5 °C	21 %	29 km/h	High 37
11 Mar after	37.5 °C	24 %	29 km/h	Very high 38
12 Mar after	38.3 °C	29 %	26 km/h	High 36

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 5 Feb 2020

After · 9 Mar 2020

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 · 274Every 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 Shadaw fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 12 February 2020 to 2 March 2020 (20 days). The perimeter dates it from 12 February 2020 to 24 February 2020.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,061 hectares (60.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Shadaw (6,088 ha, 2.8 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 35.9 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 39 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

26 October 2026 Last day with fire: 24 February 2020 → 2 March 2020.

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 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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 12 February 2020 to 24 February 2020. 274 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 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