Sotouboua fire, 17 November 2020 Sotouboua, Bassar
The fire started on 17 November 2020 in Sotouboua, Togo, and satellites saw it burning for 10 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,240 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.
It is the 22th largest in Centrale since 2016 (of 119 with a page). Number 3 in Togo in 2020, of 35.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 2,240ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 10days
- 17 Nov 2020 – 26 Nov 2020
- Municipalities hit
- 2
- prefectures
- Started on
- 17 Nov
- 2020
- Heat detections
- 61
- in a single hotspot: 64 MW
- Average daily power
- 187MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
This area had burned before
67% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 287 ha in 2016, 1,083 ha in 2017, 580 ha in 2019. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,509 ha that had burned before.
- 769 ha Sotouboua fire, November 2017 1,701 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 580 ha Sotouboua fire, December 2019 1,654 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 313 ha Sotouboua fire, December 2017 1,469 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 287 ha Sotouboua fire, December 2016 1,023 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
Sotouboua where it started2,240 ha reached on 17 Nov0.7 %
-
16 ha0.0 %
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 2020Inside 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
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
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 · 61Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 3,563 haSotouboua12 December 2021 · 20 days · 5 km away
- 4,570 haSotouboua6 December 2022 · 15 days · 9 km away
- 3,101 haSotouboua23 November 2022 · 9 days · 9 km away
- 36,837 haSotouboua26 November 2025 · 46 days · 10 km away
- 6,703 haBassar15 December 2016 · 17 days · 15 km away
- 4,783 haBassar10 December 2021 · 18 days · 17 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Sotouboua fire last?
- According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 17 November 2020 to 26 November 2020 (10 days). The perimeter dates it from 17 November 2020 to 20 November 2020.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 2,240 hectares (22.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 2 municipalities: Sotouboua (2,240 ha, 0.7 %); Bassar (16 ha, 0.0 %).
- Where does this data come from?
- From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Togo (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.
- Last day with fire: 23 November 2020 → 26 November 2020.
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
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 17 November 2020 to 20 November 2020. 61 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
- We have not matched this page with any official record.
- 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.
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-ShareAlike 2.0). 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.