Burned area
satellite only1,221ha
Perimeter published by GWIS (Copernicus).
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus)
- Date
- 6 Apr 2025 – 11 Apr 2025
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page to compare it with.
SL · Sierra Leone · –
Tambakha fire, April 2025 Tambakha
Out · last detection 11 Apr 2025, 14:49 UTC
The fire started on 6 April 2025 in Tambakha, Sierra Leone, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,221 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 600th largest in Northern since 2016 (of 937 with a page). Number 62 in Sierra Leone in 2025, of 103.
Use this data
Compare with…
Use this data
Fire page data · version 2026-11-01matches the official recordwith caveatssatellite onlymodel
When copying, the sentence is
Tick the figures you want: they make up the lede and the CSV.
Duration by satellite
satellite only6days
6 Apr 2025 to 11 Apr 2025: first and last day with fire on the page.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- last detection: 11 Apr 2025, 14:49 UTC
+− cross-check
Satellites pass a few times a day and cloud or smoke can hide the fire: a lack of detections is not an official extinction. Each country’s emergency service declares a fire contained or out.
Start
satellite only6 Apr 2025
First day with fire seen by the satellites or the perimeter.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- 6 Apr 2025
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page, so the alert time and the cause are not known here.
The worst day
satellite only349MW
Total radiative power on 7 April 2025; hotspots that day: 17.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (FRP)
- Date
- 7 Apr 2025
+− cross-check
Fire radiative power (FRP) measures the energy the fire gives off when the satellite passes. Added up by day, it compares intensity, not area.
Danger at the start
model38.1FWI · very high
Fire Weather Index (Canadian system) computed by WorldFires for the day the fire started. Consecutive days without rain before: 13.
- Source
- WorldFires calculation (Canadian FWI system)
- Date
- 6 Apr 2025, local noon
- Model
- ERA5 0,25° (ECMWF · Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com
+− cross-check
This is an index computed from weather model data, not a measurement of the fire nor an official warning. Danger warnings are issued by each country’s authority. Emergency number and official warnings
Weather during the fire
model36.5°C · 40% RH
High of 36.5 °C and minimum humidity of 40% on 10 April 2025; gusts of 35 km/h on 8 April 2025.
- Source
- weather model at the fire’s grid cell
- Date
- 6 Apr 2025 – 11 Apr 2025
- Model
- ERA5 0,25° (ECMWF · Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com
+− cross-check
These are model values for a cell of about 25 km, not from a weather station: they may differ from what was measured on the ground.
Living inside
model≈ 80people
Estimated residents inside the perimeter and 0.51 ha of built-up area (100 m grid, epoch 2025).
- Source
- GHSL R2023A · JRC
- Date
- calculated on 24 October 2026
+− cross-check
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.
This page’s change log has been kept since 24 October 2026: every night what it publishes is compared and the difference is logged. Anything earlier is reconstructed from each source’s date and marked as reconstructed.
Show
-
· reconstructed weatherWeather and FWI computed from the ERA5 reanalysis
-
logLast day with fire: 13 April 2025 → 11 April 2025.
-
logStart date: 31 March 2025 → 6 April 2025.
-
logLast day with fire: 11 April 2025 → 13 April 2025.
-
logStart date: 6 April 2025 → 31 March 2025.
-
· reconstructed GHSLPopulation and built-up area computed
Area logged each night
Move the slider to see which area the page published each day.
Versioned permanent link
https://worldfires.org/en/fire/tambakha-2025-04?v=2026-11-01A version keeps the area, dates, name and official record; the area as it was logged (changes under 2% are not logged). The map, hotspots and weather always show today’s data.
Citation
A lede of about 60 words figures only, no adjectives
CSV for this fire tambakha-2025-04.csv · daily, no individual hotspots
| fecha | focos_viirs | frp_mw | tmax_c | tmin_c | hr_min_pct | viento_max_kmh | racha_max_kmh | precip_mm | fwi | clase_fwi | dentro_del_incendio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-04-06 | 3 | 8 | 35.3 | 22.1 | 31 | 13.5 | 30.6 | 0 | 38.1 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2025-04-07 | 17 | 349 | 35.6 | 22.7 | 36 | 14.5 | 33.1 | 0 | 36.7 | alto | 1 |
| 2025-04-08 | 2 | 43 | 36.4 | 23.3 | 35 | 15.2 | 34.9 | 0 | 37.6 | alto | 1 |
| 2025-04-09 | 0 | 0 | 34.5 | 24 | 40 | 10.8 | 27.7 | 7.9 | 6.3 | bajo | 1 |
| 2025-04-10 | 0 | 0 | 36.5 | 22.2 | 40 | 7.1 | 24.8 | 3.8 | 6.1 | bajo | 1 |
| 2025-04-11 | 4 | 45 | 35.3 | 22.2 | 41 | 12.3 | 24.8 | 0.2 | 18.6 | moderado | 1 |
| 2025-04-12 | 0 | 0 | 34.3 | 22.6 | 43 | 12.7 | 29.2 | 0 | 20.4 | moderado | 0 |
| 2025-04-13 | 0 | 0 | 36.6 | 23.8 | 35 | 12.7 | 27.4 | 0 | 24.9 | alto | 0 |
| 2025-04-14 | 0 | 0 | 36.5 | 25.3 | 38 | 15.6 | 34.9 | 0 | 27.4 | alto | 0 |
| 2025-04-15 | 0 | 0 | 34.5 | 23.9 | 40 | 13 | 28.1 | 0 | 26.2 | alto | 0 |
| 2025-04-16 | 0 | 0 | 35 | 25.2 | 45 | 13 | 32 | 1 | 18.9 | moderado | 0 |
It is generated in your browser from this page’s data: one file per fire, aggregated by day and without individual hotspots.
Live widget for your story
It updates itself while the fire is still active and links to this page. Free, with the attribution shown at the bottom.
Sources for this page: GWIS (Copernicus), NASA FIRMS (VIIRS), ERA5 (ECMWF/Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0), GHSL (JRC). Open-Meteo.com · How we build fire pages: methodology
- Burnt area
- 1,221ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 6days
- 6 Apr 2025 – 11 Apr 2025
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- chiefdoms
- Started on
- 6 Apr
- 2025
- Heat detections
- 26
- in a single hotspot: 0 MW
- Danger at start
- 38
- Very high · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 111MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
HOTSPOTS BY DAY
6 Apr11 Apr
11 Apr 2025
How it evolved, day by day
6 Apr
7 Apr
8 Apr
11 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
35km/h · peak gust
31%lowest humidity
It had gone 13 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.0 mm on 16 Apr.
This area had burned before
53% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 42 ha in 2016, 429 ha in 2017, 17 ha in 2020, 78 ha in 2021, 175 ha in 2022. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 649 ha that had burned before.
- 429 ha Tambakha fire, February 2017 2,231 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 101 ha Tambakha fire, January 2022 1,240 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 78 ha Tambakha fire, January 2021 1,265 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 74 ha Tambakha fire, January 2022 1,134 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 42 ha Tambakha fire, January 2016 8,092 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 17 ha Tambakha fire, January 2020 1,343 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
-
Tambakha where it started1,178 ha0.5 %
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 2025Built-up area0.51 ha
Residents≈ 80
Inside the perimeter there were about 0.51 hectares of built-up land and about 80 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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6 Apr | 35.3 °C | 31 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 38 |
| 7 Apr | 35.6 °C | 36 % | 33 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 37 |
| 8 Apr | 36.4 °C | 35 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 38 |
| 9 Apr | 34.5 °C | 40 % | 28 km/h | 7.9 mm | Low 6 |
| 10 Apr | 36.5 °C | 40 % | 25 km/h | 3.8 mm | Low 6 |
| 11 Apr | 35.3 °C | 41 % | 25 km/h | 0.2 mm | Moderate 19 |
| 12 Apr after | 34.3 °C | 43 % | 29 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 20 |
| 13 Apr after | 36.6 °C | 35 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 25 |
| 14 Apr after | 36.5 °C | 38 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 27 |
| 15 Apr after | 34.5 °C | 40 % | 28 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 26 |
| 16 Apr after | 35.0 °C | 45 % | 32 km/h | 1.0 mm | Moderate 19 |
Its twins: fires that started in the same weather
It started with an FWI of 38.1, a minimum humidity of 31% and 13 days without rain. Fires in the area that started in weather like this since 2016: 35.
FWI at the start
38.1
Minimum humidity
31 %
Days without rain
13
this fire
chosen twins
rest of the area
Almost identicalSimilar
Outlines of the closest twins
This fire · Tambakha fire, April 2025
1,221 ha
6 days
FWI 38.1
Min. humidity 31 %
Molota fire, April 2017
2,089 ha
18 days
FWI 38.5
Min. humidity 31 %
81 km away, in 2017
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: 3.3 mm on 28 Apr.
Nieni fire, March 2017
1,501 ha
9 days
FWI 38.4
Min. humidity 31 %
124 km away, in 2017
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: 8.3 mm on 15 Mar.
Nieni fire, March 2017
1,717 ha
8 days
FWI 38.2
Min. humidity 31 %
135 km away, in 2017
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: 4.1 mm on 14 Mar.
Kalansogoia fire, March 2024
1,022 ha
2 days
FWI 37.4
Min. humidity 29 %
92 km away, in 2024
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: 1.2 mm on 6 Apr.
Kindia Ctre fire, April 2021
2,949 ha
5 days
FWI 36.6
Min. humidity 31 %
76 km away, in 2021
First rain (1 mm or more) after it ended: 3.3 mm on 13 Apr.
What happened to them
- 9 days
- median duration
- 2,170 ha
- median area
- 100 %
- went past 1,000 ha
- 3.6 mm
- rain at the end (median; 25 of 35 had it)
It stayed below its twins: 1,221 ha against a median of 2,170 ha. It lasted 6 days, against 9 days.
In 10 of 35, not even 1 mm fell in the ten days after the end: they went out without rain. In the rest, the first rainy day brought a median of 3.6 mm.
This is a bank of analogues: it shows what usually happens, not what will happen. With fewer than 15 twins we give no figures. How we calculate it
How it ended
1.0 mmfirst rain
16 Apr5 days after it ended
35km/h · max. gust
It was considered over on 11 Apr, and on 16 Apr 1.0 mm fell. We do not know whether the rain or the firefighters put it out. Twins with rain when they ended: 25 of 35, with a median of 3.6 mm.
Weather on this page: Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)
How a twin is chosen
- Same area: fires that have already ended, less than 250 km from this one, since 2016.
- Same start: we compare the FWI on the first day, the minimum humidity that day and the run of days without rain before it. The slider sets how much they may differ.
- Only pages with final weather data (ERA5 reanalysis) calculated in the same way as this fire’s; agricultural and grass burns and pages with data under review are left out.
- Fires burning at the same time as this one (a week before or after) are left out: they share the same spell of weather and do not count as a precedent.
- They are sorted by similarity, and the outlines of the first five are drawn.
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
↔
Before · 30 Mar 2025
After · 18 Apr 2025
Sentinel-2 did not pass over on that day. Try another date, or use false colour, which is daily.
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 · CopernicusOn 12 April 2025 the air beside the fire reached 72 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 42: 2.8 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
PM2.5 peak72 µg/m³
Days over the guideline10 days
PM10104 µg/m³
Optical depth1.05
WHO 15
4 Apr7 Apr10 Apr13 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 · 0Every 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
- 8,092 haTambakha24 January 2016 · 12 days · 12 km away
- 6,058 haKasunko22 January 2026 · 10 days · 31 km away
- 5,583 haSoyahApril 2017 · 8 days · 32 km away
- 4,883 haSoyah9 February 2026 · 19 days · 35 km away
- 5,742 haTambakha6 February 2019 · 26 days · 37 km away
- 5,407 haSougueta6 April 2026 · 24 days · 39 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Tambakha fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 6 April 2025 and 11 April 2025: 6 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 1,221 hectares (12.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Tambakha (1,178 ha, 0.5 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 36.5 °C, humidity dropped to 31 % and gusts hit 35 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 38, class Very high.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Sierra Leone (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.
- How did the fires that started in similar weather in this area end?
- Fires less than 250 km away that started since 2016 with a similar FWI, humidity and dry spell: 35. Their median duration was 9 days and their median area 2,170 ha; 100 % went past 1,000 ha. In 10 of 35, not even 1 mm fell in the ten days after the end: they went out without rain. In the rest, the first rainy day brought a median of 3.6 mm.
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 · 4 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
- Last day with fire: 13 April 2025 → 11 April 2025.
- Start date: 31 March 2025 → 6 April 2025.
- Last day with fire: 11 April 2025 → 13 April 2025.
- Start date: 6 April 2025 → 31 March 2025.
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.
Report an error
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. No 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.
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.