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Trapeang Prasat fire, April 2016 Trapeang Prasat, Anlong Veaeng

Out · last detection 25 Apr 2016, 18:25 UTC

The fire started on 1 April 2016 in Trapeang Prasat, Cambodia, and satellites saw it burning for 25 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 7,677 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 2th largest in Oddar Meanchey since 2016 (of 16 with a page). Number 10 in Cambodia in 2016, of 118.

Compare with…
Burnt area
7,677ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
25days
1 Apr 2016 – 25 Apr 2016
Municipalities hit
2
districts
Started on
1 Apr
2016
Heat detections
486
in a single hotspot: 285 MW
Danger at start
20
Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power
170MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Apr25 Apr
25 Apr 2016

How it evolved, day by day

1 Apr 2016 · 21 MW · 5 2 Apr 2016 · 5 MW · 3 3 Apr 2016 · 88 MW · 17 6 Apr 2016 · 37 MW · 4 7 Apr 2016 · 18 MW · 4 8 Apr 2016 · 42 MW · 16 9 Apr 2016 · 54 MW · 14 10 Apr 2016 · 108 MW · 16 11 Apr 2016 · 76 MW · 17 12 Apr 2016 · 1,507 MW · 52 13 Apr 2016 · 262 MW · 57 14 Apr 2016 · 493 MW · 128 15 Apr 2016 · 334 MW · 92 16 Apr 2016 · 113 MW · 24 17 Apr 2016 · 11 MW · 2 18 Apr 2016 · 99 MW · 11 22 Apr 2016 · 11 MW · 1 23 Apr 2016 · 3 MW · 2 24 Apr 2016 · 108 MW · 19 25 Apr 2016 · 2 MW · 2
1 Apr 6 Apr 9 Apr 12 Apr 15 Apr 18 Apr 24 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

40°high
34km/h · peak gust
32%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.8 mm on 28 Apr.

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 4.8% of the area of London (77 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. Trapeang Prasat where it started
    5,884 ha reached on 1 Apr
    3.9 %
  2. 1,833 ha reached on 1 Apr
    1.2 %

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 2015
Built-up area1.2 ha
Residents≈ 1,300

Inside the perimeter there were about 1.2 hectares of built-up land and about 1,300 residents (GHSL 2015, 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

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)
1 Apr 35.3 °C 49 % 17 km/h 0.2 mm Moderate 20
2 Apr 36.3 °C 43 % 19 km/h 0.2 mm High 24
3 Apr 35.7 °C 49 % 17 km/h 0.9 mm Moderate 18
4 Apr 36.7 °C 48 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
5 Apr 36.9 °C 44 % 24 km/h 0.4 mm High 24
6 Apr 38.5 °C 36 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
7 Apr 38.3 °C 39 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
8 Apr 38.4 °C 44 % 23 km/h 0.1 mm High 28
9 Apr 37.8 °C 46 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
10 Apr 39.2 °C 34 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
11 Apr 40.0 °C 32 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
12 Apr 39.4 °C 35 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
13 Apr 39.3 °C 34 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
14 Apr 39.5 °C 35 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
15 Apr 40.1 °C 35 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
16 Apr 40.0 °C 38 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
17 Apr 38.9 °C 43 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
18 Apr 39.8 °C 41 % 20 km/h 0.1 mm High 33
19 Apr 36.4 °C 51 % 27 km/h 1.8 mm Moderate 14
20 Apr 35.4 °C 55 % 20 km/h 1.3 mm Moderate 12
21 Apr 37.1 °C 45 % 22 km/h 0.4 mm High 22
22 Apr 37.1 °C 44 % 28 km/h 0.1 mm High 25
23 Apr 38.0 °C 39 % 32 km/h 0.4 mm High 30
24 Apr 39.0 °C 32 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
25 Apr 38.6 °C 39 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
26 Apr after 40.0 °C 36 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
27 Apr after 38.7 °C 41 % 27 km/h 0.5 mm High 33
28 Apr after 39.7 °C 37 % 22 km/h 1.8 mm High 22

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 25 Mar 2016
After · 2 May 2016

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 · 486Every 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 Cambodia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Trapeang Prasat fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 1 April 2016 to 25 April 2016 (25 days). The perimeter dates it from 7 April 2016 to 18 April 2016.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 7,677 hectares (76.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Trapeang Prasat (5,884 ha, 3.9 %); Anlong Veaeng (1,833 ha, 1.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 40.1 °C, humidity dropped to 32 % and gusts hit 34 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 36, class High.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Cambodia (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 · 2 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 18 April 2016 → 25 April 2016.
  2. Start date: 7 April 2016 → 1 April 2016.

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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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 7 April 2016 to 18 April 2016. 486 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 2015, 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 ADM2 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (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.