Chefia fire, 28 July 2020 الشافية · Chefia, Lac des Oiseaux
The fire started on 28 July 2020 in Chefia, Algeria, and satellites saw it burning for 5 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 963 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 2 municipalities.
It is the 22th largest in El Tarf since 2016 (of 121 with a page). Number 17 in Algeria in 2020, of 236.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 963ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- 5days
- 28 Jul 2020 – 1 Aug 2020
- Municipalities hit
- 2
- communes
- Started on
- 28 Jul
- 2020
- Heat detections
- 54
- in a single hotspot: 361 MW
- Danger at start
- 62
- Extreme · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 1.4GW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
It had gone 13 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.
This area had burned before
7% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 71 ha in 2017.
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
855 ha reached on 29 Jul4.4 %
-
110 ha reached on 29 Jul1.3 %
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
- Mixed forest93 %
- Other natural land7.0 %
Land cover inside the perimeter as reported by Copernicus EFFIS (outside the Corine Land Cover area).
People and buildings inside the perimeter
GHSL 2020Inside 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 | Rain | Danger (FWI) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29 Jul | 41.2 °C | 12 % | 50 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 62 |
| 30 Jul | 42.6 °C | 11 % | 51 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 66 |
| 31 Jul | 44.1 °C | 7 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 65 |
| 1 Aug | 38.8 °C | 17 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 54 |
| 2 Aug after | 39.9 °C | 16 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 56 |
| 3 Aug after | 34.5 °C | 38 % | 46 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 42 |
| 4 Aug after | 30.4 °C | 38 % | 39 km/h | 0.8 mm | High 27 |
| 5 Aug after | 29.6 °C | 35 % | 39 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 29 |
| 6 Aug after | 30.6 °C | 36 % | 39 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 30 |
| 7 Aug after | 31.0 °C | 39 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 30 |
| 8 Aug after | 31.3 °C | 43 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 30 |
| 9 Aug after | 32.0 °C | 34 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 32 |
| 10 Aug after | 35.6 °C | 22 % | 47 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 47 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
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 · CopernicusOn 31 July 2020 the air beside the fire reached 45 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 16: 1.0 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
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 · 54Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 2,760 haChefia الشافية10 August 2021 · 4 days · 10 km away
- 6,376 haEl Tarf الطارف25 August 2026 · 4 days · 12 km away
- 6,415 haBouteldja بوثلجةAugust 2022 · 9 days · 20 km away
- 7,171 haBuqus بوقوس23 July 2017 · 13 days · 21 km away
- 2,887 haHammam Beni Salah حمام بني صالح15 August 2022 · 4 days · 25 km away
- 3,193 haMedjez Sfa مجاز الصفاءAugust 2022 · 2 days · 33 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Chefia fire last?
- According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 28 July 2020 to 1 August 2020 (5 days). The perimeter dates it from 29 July 2020 to 29 July 2020.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 963 hectares (9.6 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 2 municipalities: Chefia (855 ha, 4.4 %); Lac des Oiseaux (110 ha, 1.3 %).
- Did the fire reach a town?
- The fire came within 3.4 km of the centre of Lac des Oiseaux, the closest of the areas it touched. That is the distance from the perimeter, or the nearest hotspot, to the point marking the centre; it does not mean it entered the houses.
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 44.1 °C, humidity dropped to 7 % and gusts hit 51 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 66, class Extreme.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Algeria (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: 14 · 1021 · 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.
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
How we know this
- Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
- Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 29 July 2020 to 29 July 2020. 54 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.
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-ShareAlike 2.0). 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.