How long did the Songea fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 4 October 2020 and 12 October 2020: 9 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 15,480 hectares (154.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Songea (15,543 ha, 1.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 31.9 °C, humidity dropped to 27 % and gusts hit 40 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 32, class High.

Where does this data come from?

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

TZ · Tanzania · 2020-10-04 → 2020-10-12

Songea fire, October 2020 Songea

Out · last detection 12 Oct 2020, 22:13 UTC

The fire started on 4 October 2020 in Songea, Tanzania, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 15,480 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 2th largest in Ruvuma since 2016 (of 92 with a page). Number 11 in Tanzania in 2020, of 187.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Songea · 2017 Songea · 2019 Songea · 2016 Njombe · 2025

Burnt area: 15,480ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 9days; 4 Oct 2020 – 12 Oct 2020
Municipalities hit: 1; districts
Started on: 4 Oct; 2020
Heat detections: 561; in a single hotspot: 409 MW
Danger at start: 31; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 971MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 4 Oct12 Oct

Play back 12 Oct 2020

How it evolved, day by day

4 Oct 6 Oct 8 Oct 10 Oct 12 Oct

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

The weather it burned in

32°high

40km/h · peak gust

27%lowest humidity

It had gone 40 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 5.8 mm on 13 Oct.

This area had burned before

52% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 107 ha in 2016, 7,689 ha in 2017, 527 ha in 2019.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 9.8% of the area of London (155 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

Songea where it started

15,543 ha reached on 3 Oct

1.1 %

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.

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)
4 Oct	30.8 °C	29 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
5 Oct	31.5 °C	32 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
6 Oct	31.9 °C	27 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
7 Oct	28.9 °C	39 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
8 Oct	28.7 °C	42 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
9 Oct	29.9 °C	46 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
10 Oct	30.3 °C	40 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
11 Oct	31.8 °C	34 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 29
12 Oct	29.6 °C	42 %	36 km/h	0.9 mm	High 22
13 Oct after	26.8 °C	56 %	37 km/h	5.8 mm	Very low 4

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 27 Sept 2020

After · 19 Oct 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 · 561Every 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 Tanzania ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Songea fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 4 October 2020 and 12 October 2020: 9 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 15,480 hectares (154.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Songea (15,543 ha, 1.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 31.9 °C, humidity dropped to 27 % and gusts hit 40 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 32, class High.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Tanzania (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 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?

Your connection to the fire (optional) Email (optional)

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.
Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 561 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.

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.

Where it burned