How long did the Yaso fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 5 January 2016 and 20 January 2016: 16 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 8,828 hectares (88.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire entered 3 municipalities: Yaso (5,580 ha, 2.1 %); Gida Ayana (2,547 ha, 1.4 %); Ibantu (765 ha, 0.9 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 34.5 °C, humidity dropped to 13 % and gusts hit 34 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 45, class Very high.

Where does this data come from?

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

ET · Ethiopia · 2016-01-05 → 2016-01-20

Yaso fire, 5 January 2016 Yaso, Gida Ayana, Ibantu

Out · last detection 21 Jan 2016, 10:37 UTC

The fire started on 5 January 2016 in Yaso, Ethiopia, and satellites saw it burning for 16 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 8,828 hectares from heat detections, spread across 3 municipalities.

It is the 7th largest in Oromia since 2016 (of 264 with a page). Number 26 in Ethiopia in 2016, of 309.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Yaso · 2017 Yaso · 2026 Yaso · 2021 Wemberma · 2016

Burnt area: 8,828ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 16days; 5 Jan 2016 – 20 Jan 2016
Municipalities hit: 3; districts
Started on: 5 Jan; 2016
Heat detections: 264; in a single hotspot: 32 MW
Danger at start: 35; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 72MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 5 Jan20 Jan

Play back 21 Jan 2016

How it evolved, day by day

5 Jan 8 Jan 11 Jan 15 Jan 18 Jan 21 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

34°high

34km/h · peak gust

13%lowest humidity

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

This area had burned before

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

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 5.6% of the area of London (88 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

Yaso where it started

5,580 ha reached on 5 Jan

2.1 %
Gida Ayana

2,547 ha reached on 5 Jan

1.4 %
Ibantu

765 ha reached on 9 Jan

0.9 %

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 area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (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	Danger (FWI)
5 Jan	33.3 °C	26 %	23 km/h	High 35
6 Jan	31.8 °C	26 %	27 km/h	High 34
7 Jan	33.9 °C	18 %	30 km/h	High 36
8 Jan	33.3 °C	17 %	22 km/h	High 33
9 Jan	34.5 °C	15 %	34 km/h	Very high 41
10 Jan	33.0 °C	13 %	30 km/h	Very high 40
11 Jan	33.6 °C	15 %	30 km/h	Very high 40
12 Jan	33.2 °C	22 %	32 km/h	Very high 38
13 Jan	31.0 °C	19 %	26 km/h	Very high 39
14 Jan	33.4 °C	19 %	26 km/h	Very high 40
15 Jan	32.2 °C	19 %	30 km/h	Very high 39
16 Jan	32.0 °C	19 %	31 km/h	Very high 40
17 Jan	33.4 °C	18 %	31 km/h	Very high 42
18 Jan	32.1 °C	17 %	34 km/h	Very high 44
19 Jan	33.1 °C	15 %	34 km/h	Very high 45
20 Jan	33.7 °C	15 %	29 km/h	Very high 41
21 Jan after	34.5 °C	17 %	30 km/h	Very high 41
22 Jan after	33.3 °C	21 %	37 km/h	Very high 44
23 Jan after	34.0 °C	19 %	28 km/h	Very high 44
24 Jan after	33.1 °C	20 %	32 km/h	Very high 44
25 Jan after	34.7 °C	15 %	32 km/h	Very high 45
26 Jan after	33.9 °C	22 %	34 km/h	Very high 42
27 Jan after	33.5 °C	21 %	43 km/h	Very high 46
28 Jan after	32.8 °C	19 %	39 km/h	Very high 46
29 Jan after	31.9 °C	18 %	38 km/h	Very high 46
30 Jan after	32.9 °C	18 %	26 km/h	Very high 41

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 29 Dec 2015

After · 27 Jan 2016

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 · 264Every 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 Ethiopia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Yaso fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 5 January 2016 and 20 January 2016: 16 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 8,828 hectares (88.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire entered 3 municipalities: Yaso (5,580 ha, 2.1 %); Gida Ayana (2,547 ha, 1.4 %); Ibantu (765 ha, 0.9 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 34.5 °C, humidity dropped to 13 % and gusts hit 34 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 45, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Ethiopia (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

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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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 264 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 ADM3 (Open Data Commons Open Database License 1.0). 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.

Where it burned