Crișan fire, 14 March 2020 Crișan, Sulina, Sfântu Gheorghe
The fire started on 14 March 2020 in Crișan, Romania, and satellites saw it burning for 5 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 2,166 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 3 municipalities.
This record is fire in the reed beds of the Danube Delta, not a forest fire. Thousands of hectares of reed burn in the delta every year, mostly between January and April, and many of these burns are deliberate. That is why it is left out of the fire rankings.
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- Burnt area
- 2,166ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- 5days
- 14 Mar 2020 – 18 Mar 2020
- Municipalities hit
- 3
- municipalities
- Started on
- 14 Mar
- 2020
- Heat detections
- 39
- in a single hotspot: 169 MW
- Danger at start
- 5
- Very low · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 474MW
- 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 3 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.8 mm on 23 Mar.
This area had burned before
57% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,231 ha in 2019.
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Bucharest boundary: geoBoundaries · World Bank (CC BY 4.0).
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).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
1,127 ha reached on 14 Mar2.9 %
-
Sulina 3,118 inhabitants · 10.7 km from the centre695 ha reached on 15 Mar2.1 %
-
Sfântu Gheorghe 639 inhabitants · 10.8 km from the centre342 ha reached on 14 Mar0.6 %
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
- Other natural land94 %
- Other land cover5.7 %
Natura 2000 protected area affected: 100 %
- LIC Delta Dunării ROSCI0065
- ZEPA Delta Dunării și Complexul Razim - Sinoie ROSPA0031
Natura 2000 sites (European Environment Agency, 2024 release) crossed by the perimeter.
Land cover inside the perimeter according to Corine Land Cover, as reported by Copernicus.
People and buildings inside the perimeter
GHSL 2020Inside the perimeter there were about 0.38 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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 14 Mar | 12.6 °C | 45 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very low 5 |
| 15 Mar | 8.8 °C | 29 % | 48 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 8 |
| 16 Mar | 7.4 °C | 30 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 6 |
| 17 Mar | 8.7 °C | 46 % | 43 km/h | 0.1 mm | Low 7 |
| 18 Mar | 9.1 °C | 45 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 6 |
| 19 Mar after | 12.8 °C | 38 % | 26 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 6 |
| 20 Mar after | 16.1 °C | 50 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 7 |
| 21 Mar after | 14.5 °C | 52 % | 44 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 8 |
| 22 Mar after | 9.2 °C | 63 % | 43 km/h | 0.1 mm | Low 6 |
| 23 Mar after | 6.9 °C | 69 % | 59 km/h | 1.8 mm | Very low 3 |
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.
Detections table · 39Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 10,843 haSfântu GheorgheJanuary 2025 · 5 days · 7 km away
- 9,392 haSfântu Gheorghe18 March 2022 · 5 days · 12 km away
- 7,618 haSulina14 February 2025 · 7 days · 12 km away
- 10,396 haSfântu Gheorghe10 March 2019 · 8 days · 16 km away
- 10,147 haSfântu Gheorghe18 February 2025 · 6 days · 17 km away
- 7,692 haSulina20 March 2022 · 9 days · 23 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Crișan fire last?
- Copernicus dates it between 14 March 2020 and 18 March 2020: 5 days between the first and last image with fire.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 2,166 hectares (21.7 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 3 municipalities: Crișan (1,127 ha, 2.9 %); Sulina (695 ha, 2.1 %); Sfântu Gheorghe (342 ha, 0.6 %).
- Did the fire reach a town?
- The fire came within 10.7 km of the centre of Sulina, 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 12.6 °C, humidity dropped to 29 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 8, class Low.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Romania (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: 112 · 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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 39 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.
- Probably a vegetation burn: not counted in the totals.
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 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)). 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.