How long did the As-Saan fire last?

Copernicus dates it between 20 May 2021 and 25 May 2021: 6 days between the first and last image with fire.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 1,980 hectares (19.8 km²). Official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered As-Saan (1,984 ha, 1.0 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 38.3 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 65 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 77, class Very extreme.

Where does this data come from?

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

SY · Syria · 2021-05-20 → 2021-05-25

As-Saan fire, May 2021 As-Saan

Out · last measured on 25 May 2021

The fire started on 20 May 2021 in As-Saan, Syria, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 1,980 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 7th largest in Hama since 2016 (of 37 with a page). Number 3 in Syria in 2021, of 23.

Compare with…

Suggestions: As-Saan · 2019 As-Saan · 2019 As-Saan · 2019 As-Saan · 2019

We have the Copernicus perimeter for this fire, but the VIIRS sensors did not capture it in enough detail: no day-by-day evolution, but the split by municipality is there.

Burnt area: 1,980ha; Copernicus perimeter
Duration: 6days; 20 May 2021 – 25 May 2021
Municipalities hit: 1; subdistricts
Started on: 20 May; 2021
Danger at start: 48; Very high · FWI index

The weather it burned in

38°high

65km/h · peak gust

14%lowest humidity

It had gone 37 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

37% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 735 ha in 2019.

735 ha As-Saan fire, May 2019 23,331 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 1.3% of the area of London (20 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

As-Saan where it started

1,984 ha

1.0 %

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

Agricultural areas100 %

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

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2020

Built-up area0.16 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.16 hectares of 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	Rain	Danger (FWI)
20 May	38.3 °C	14 %	22 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
21 May	38.1 °C	18 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 67
22 May	28.7 °C	23 %	65 km/h	0.0 mm	Very extreme 77
23 May	28.4 °C	25 %	53 km/h	0.8 mm	Extreme 57
24 May	29.8 °C	23 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 46
25 May	33.2 °C	23 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 52
26 May after	36.0 °C	11 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 59
27 May after	36.2 °C	15 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Very extreme 71
28 May after	34.6 °C	20 %	49 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 70
29 May after	30.6 °C	28 %	50 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 58
30 May after	32.4 °C	18 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 46
31 May after	37.3 °C	14 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 66
1 Jun after	32.7 °C	20 %	51 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 66
2 Jun after	30.3 °C	23 %	54 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 68
3 Jun after	30.6 °C	15 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 50
4 Jun after	31.2 °C	20 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 13 May 2021

After · 1 Jun 2021

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.

Other fires nearby

All fires in Syria ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the As-Saan fire last?: Copernicus dates it between 20 May 2021 and 25 May 2021: 6 days between the first and last image with fire.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 1,980 hectares (19.8 km²). Official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered As-Saan (1,984 ha, 1.0 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 38.3 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 65 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 77, class Very extreme.
Where does this data come from?: From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Syria (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 ↗
EFFIS · 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.

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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 really happened?

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How we know this

Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. No 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 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 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 slightly from each country’s official figure.

Where it burned