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الفحص fire, July 2024 الفحص, الناظور

Out · last detection 3 Jul 2024, 01:41 UTC

The fire started on 2 July 2024 in الفحص, Tunisia, and satellites saw it burning for 2 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 303 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 2 municipalities.

The largest in Tunisia in 2024, of 2.

Compare with…
Burnt area
303ha
Copernicus perimeter
Duration
2days
2 Jul 2024 – 3 Jul 2024
Municipalities hit
2
delegations
Started on
2 Jul
2024
Heat detections
14
in a single hotspot: 191 MW
Danger at start
45
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
808MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 2 Jul3 Jul
3 Jul 2024

How it evolved, day by day

2 Jul 2024 · 1,614 MW · 13 3 Jul 2024 · 1 MW · 1
2 Jul 3 Jul

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

The weather it burned in

28°high
64km/h · peak gust
35%lowest humidity

It had gone 40 days 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.

What happened to each town

  1. الفحص where it started
    249 ha reached on 2 Jul
    0.3 %
  2. 55 ha
    0.2 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the official 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.

What burned

  • Scrub and transitional woodland59 %
  • Coniferous forest35 %
  • Agricultural areas4.3 %
  • Mixed forest1.7 %

Land cover inside the perimeter as reported by Copernicus EFFIS (outside the Corine Land Cover area).

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)
2 Jul 27.8 °C 39 % 64 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
3 Jul 28.0 °C 35 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
4 Jul after 28.9 °C 36 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
5 Jul after 30.7 °C 32 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
6 Jul after 34.4 °C 33 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
7 Jul after 31.9 °C 47 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
8 Jul after 32.8 °C 37 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
9 Jul after 36.0 °C 36 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
10 Jul after 34.3 °C 34 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
11 Jul after 34.8 °C 33 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
12 Jul after 35.0 °C 26 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
13 Jul after 35.4 °C 36 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 36

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 25 Jun 2024
After · 10 Jul 2024

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 1 July 2024 the air beside the fire reached 20 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak20 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1053 µg/m³
Optical depth0.76
30123456
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 · 14Every 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 Tunisia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the الفحص fire last?
Copernicus dates it between 2 July 2024 and 3 July 2024: 2 days between the first and last image with fire.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 303 hectares (3.0 km²). Official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: الفحص (249 ha, 0.3 %); الناظور (55 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 28.0 °C, humidity dropped to 35 % and gusts hit 64 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 45, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Tunisia (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: 198 · 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.

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.

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 198.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 14 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 and land cover come from the Copernicus European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), measured on MODIS and Sentinel-2 imagery and published under CC BY 4.0. 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 (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 slightly from each country’s official figure.