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CI · Côte d’Ivoire · –

Tendéné-Bambarasso fire, January 2026 Tendéné-Bambarasso

Out · last detection 26 Jan 2026, 14:16 UTC

The fire started on 22 January 2026 in Tendéné-Bambarasso, Côte d’Ivoire, and satellites saw it burning for 5 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,068 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 112 in Côte d’Ivoire in 2026, of 136.

GWIS near-real-time perimeter, from the layer that changed in August 2025: this fire is not compared with fires from earlier years, because since then the GWIS layer gives more and larger perimeters.

The power measured by the satellite is low (11.1 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: Bilimono · 2019

Burnt area
1,068ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
5days
22 Jan 2026 – 26 Jan 2026
Municipalities hit
1
sub-prefectures
Started on
22 Jan
2026
Heat detections
18
in a single hotspot: 11 MW
Danger at start
42
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
28MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 22 Jan26 Jan
26 Jan 2026

How it evolved, day by day

24 Jan 2026 · 1 MW · 1 25 Jan 2026 · 53 MW · 9 26 Jan 2026 · 30 MW · 8
24 Jan 25 Jan 26 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

36°high
32km/h · peak gust
9%lowest humidity

It had gone 37 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.1 mm on 3 Feb.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 0.7% of the area of London (11 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

  1. Tendéné-Bambarasso where it started
    1,075 ha reached on 24 Jan
    0.8 %

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 2025
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (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)
22 Jan 34.2 °C 17 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
23 Jan 34.6 °C 17 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
24 Jan 35.5 °C 16 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
25 Jan 35.7 °C 9 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
26 Jan 35.6 °C 12 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
27 Jan after 35.6 °C 14 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
28 Jan after 35.5 °C 18 % 20 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
29 Jan after 35.6 °C 21 % 20 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
30 Jan after 36.6 °C 24 % 19 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
31 Jan after 36.1 °C 31 % 19 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
1 Feb after 36.4 °C 30 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
2 Feb after 36.2 °C 33 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
3 Feb after 34.1 °C 41 % 24 km/h 2.1 mm Moderate 17

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 15 Jan 2026
After · 2 Feb 2026

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 · Copernicus

On 29 January 2026 the air beside the fire reached 75 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 65: 4.3 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak75 µg/m³
Days over the guideline10 days
PM10272 µg/m³
Optical depth0.76
20 Jan22 Jan24 Jan26 Jan28 Jan
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 · 18Every 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 timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Côte d’Ivoire

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Tendéné-Bambarasso fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 22 January 2026 to 26 January 2026 (5 days). The perimeter dates it from 24 January 2026 to 26 January 2026.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 1,068 hectares (10.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Tendéné-Bambarasso (1,075 ha, 0.8 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 35.7 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 32 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 50, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Côte d’Ivoire (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: 180 · Emergency number and official warnings

Satellite cross-check

History of this page Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

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
What do you think is wrong?

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 180.

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 24 January 2026 to 26 January 2026. 18 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.

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 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.