How long did the Yalinga fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 19 January 2022 to 12 February 2022 (25 days). The perimeter dates it from 23 January 2022 to 12 February 2022.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 140,621 hectares (1,406.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Yalinga (141,480 ha, 3.4 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 37.1 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 44 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 59, class Extreme.

Where does this data come from?

From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Central African Republic (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

CF · Central African Republic · 2022-01-19 → 2022-02-12

Yalinga fire, 19 January 2022 Yalinga

Out · last detection 13 Feb 2022, 00:39 UTC

The fire started on 19 January 2022 in Yalinga, Central African Republic, and satellites saw it burning for 25 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 140,621 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

This page is probably a fire complex, not a single fire. GWIS merges into one perimeter the fires that touch over weeks, which in large burning seasons can join dozens of separate fires. The total area is reliable; the origin and dates refer to the whole complex.

Other fire pages in the same area and on the same dates:

It is the 11th largest in Haute-Kotto since 2016 (of 372 with a page). The largest in Central African Republic in 2022, of 98.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Yalinga · 2020 Yalinga · 2022 Yalinga · 2022 Yalinga · 2018

Burnt area: 140,621ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 25days; 19 Jan 2022 – 12 Feb 2022
Municipalities hit: 1; sub-prefectures
Started on: 19 Jan; 2022
Heat detections: 5,843; in a single hotspot: 168 MW
Danger at start: 48; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 2.0GW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 19 Jan12 Feb

Play back 13 Feb 2022

How it evolved, day by day

20 Jan 25 Jan 29 Jan 1 Feb 2 Feb 6 Feb 10 Feb

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

37°high

44km/h · peak gust

9%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

80% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 62,181 ha in 2016, 33,529 ha in 2017, 73,408 ha in 2018, 2,681 ha in 2019, 131,845 ha in 2020, 5,509 ha in 2021. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 113,166 ha that had burned before.

56,901 ha Yalinga fire, January 2020 353,408 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 89% of the area of London (1,406 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

Yalinga where it started

141,480 ha reached on 20 Jan

3.4 %

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 2020

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside 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

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	Danger (FWI)
23 Jan	35.3 °C	12 %	31 km/h	Very high 48
24 Jan	35.7 °C	13 %	34 km/h	Very high 50
25 Jan	36.0 °C	11 %	39 km/h	Extreme 54
26 Jan	35.6 °C	12 %	40 km/h	Extreme 55
27 Jan	34.2 °C	11 %	44 km/h	Extreme 59
28 Jan	33.9 °C	12 %	41 km/h	Extreme 58
29 Jan	33.5 °C	10 %	38 km/h	Extreme 55
30 Jan	33.9 °C	9 %	35 km/h	Extreme 54
31 Jan	34.5 °C	9 %	36 km/h	Extreme 54
1 Feb	33.6 °C	10 %	32 km/h	Extreme 53
2 Feb	34.3 °C	12 %	27 km/h	Extreme 50
3 Feb	37.1 °C	11 %	31 km/h	Extreme 52
4 Feb	36.5 °C	9 %	38 km/h	Extreme 58
5 Feb	32.2 °C	11 %	35 km/h	Extreme 58
6 Feb	32.9 °C	10 %	37 km/h	Extreme 57
7 Feb	33.5 °C	8 %	38 km/h	Extreme 58
8 Feb	35.1 °C	7 %	37 km/h	Extreme 57
9 Feb	36.0 °C	9 %	27 km/h	Extreme 54
10 Feb	36.5 °C	10 %	38 km/h	Extreme 58
11 Feb	35.9 °C	9 %	38 km/h	Extreme 59
12 Feb	36.4 °C	10 %	36 km/h	Extreme 58
13 Feb after	36.9 °C	8 %	35 km/h	Extreme 57
14 Feb after	36.8 °C	8 %	37 km/h	Extreme 59
15 Feb after	36.8 °C	7 %	33 km/h	Extreme 58

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 12 Jan 2022

After · 19 Feb 2022

Before After

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 · 5,843Every 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

All fires in Central African Republic ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Yalinga fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 19 January 2022 to 12 February 2022 (25 days). The perimeter dates it from 23 January 2022 to 12 February 2022.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 140,621 hectares (1,406.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Yalinga (141,480 ha, 3.4 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 37.1 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 44 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 59, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Central African Republic (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

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

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

No changes since 24 October 2026.

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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What do you think is wrong?

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What really happened?

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How we know this

Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery; 3 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 23 January 2022 to 12 February 2022. 5,843 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 2020, 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.

Where it burned