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MM · Myanmar · –

Tonzang fire, April 2026 Tonzang

Out · last detection 25 Apr 2026, 06:27 UTC

The fire started on 10 April 2026 in Tonzang, Myanmar, and satellites saw it burning for 16 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,698 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 111 in Myanmar in 2026, of 480.

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

Burnt area
5,698ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
16days
10 Apr 2026 – 25 Apr 2026
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
10 Apr
2026
Heat detections
157
in a single hotspot: 123 MW
Danger at start
8
Low · FWI index
Average daily power
312MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 10 Apr25 Apr
25 Apr 2026

How it evolved, day by day

10 Apr 2026 · 13 MW · 2 12 Apr 2026 · 844 MW · 26 13 Apr 2026 · 96 MW · 11 14 Apr 2026 · 440 MW · 30 15 Apr 2026 · 2,162 MW · 66 16 Apr 2026 · 26 MW · 4 18 Apr 2026 · 11 MW · 2 21 Apr 2026 · 36 MW · 1 22 Apr 2026 · 1 MW · 1 23 Apr 2026 · 28 MW · 4 24 Apr 2026 · 77 MW · 9 25 Apr 2026 · 7 MW · 1
10 Apr 15 Apr 23 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

27°high
64km/h · peak gust
26%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 4.5 mm on 26 Apr.

This area had burned before

86% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 802 ha in 2021, 1,091 ha in 2022, 3,247 ha in 2023, 733 ha in 2024, 3,352 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 4,909 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 3.6% of the area of London (57 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. Tonzang where it started
    5,716 ha reached on 10 Apr
    1.6 %

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)

Started with Strong wind: 1.8 % of the area in Myanmar

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
10 Apr 18.4 °C 28 % 64 km/h 0.5 mm Low 8
11 Apr 19.8 °C 29 % 55 km/h 0.3 mm Moderate 18
12 Apr 21.4 °C 27 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
13 Apr 21.9 °C 31 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
14 Apr 23.4 °C 27 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
15 Apr 23.2 °C 26 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
16 Apr 22.4 °C 26 % 53 km/h 0.6 mm High 28
17 Apr 23.1 °C 36 % 35 km/h 0.5 mm Moderate 16
18 Apr 23.2 °C 35 % 36 km/h 0.2 mm Moderate 19
19 Apr 21.3 °C 41 % 39 km/h 0.9 mm Moderate 20
20 Apr 24.2 °C 33 % 58 km/h 0.1 mm High 23
21 Apr 24.8 °C 28 % 58 km/h 0.2 mm High 31
22 Apr 23.9 °C 33 % 56 km/h 0.7 mm High 32
23 Apr 23.4 °C 33 % 41 km/h 0.5 mm High 22
24 Apr 26.7 °C 27 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
25 Apr 25.0 °C 33 % 38 km/h 0.1 mm High 22
26 Apr after 20.1 °C 38 % 41 km/h 4.5 mm Moderate 21

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 3 Apr 2026
After · 2 May 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 17 April 2026 the air beside the fire reached 137 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 82: 5.4 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak137 µg/m³
Days over the guideline13 days
PM10157 µg/m³
Optical depth1.68
8 Apr11 Apr14 Apr17 Apr20 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 · 157Every 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 Myanmar

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Tonzang fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 10 April 2026 to 25 April 2026 (16 days). The perimeter dates it from 10 April 2026 to 18 April 2026.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 5,698 hectares (57.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Tonzang (5,716 ha, 1.6 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 26.7 °C, humidity dropped to 26 % and gusts hit 64 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 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

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 18 April 2026 → 25 April 2026.

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.

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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 10 April 2026 to 18 April 2026. 157 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 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.