El Amra fire, August 2021 العامرة · El Amra
The fire started on 11 August 2021 in El Amra, Algeria, and satellites saw it burning for 5 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 3,363 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 2th largest in Aïn Defla since 2016 (of 36 with a page). Number 12 in Algeria in 2021, of 92.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 3,363ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- 5days
- 11 Aug 2021 – 15 Aug 2021
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- communes
- Started on
- 11 Aug
- 2021
- Heat detections
- 194
- in a single hotspot: 202 MW
- Danger at start
- 76
- Very extreme · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 1.1GW
- 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 more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.
This area had burned before
2% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 6 ha in 2017, 30 ha in 2019, 17 ha in 2020.
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
-
3,372 ha reached on 11 Aug19 %
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 forest63 %
- Other natural land32 %
- Broadleaved forest5.0 %
Land cover inside the perimeter as reported by Copernicus EFFIS (outside the Corine Land Cover area).
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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11 Aug | 41.4 °C | 6 % | 54 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very extreme 76 |
| 12 Aug | 41.6 °C | 6 % | 50 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very extreme 95 |
| 13 Aug | 40.4 °C | 7 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 60 |
| 14 Aug | 40.1 °C | 7 % | 44 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 54 |
| 15 Aug | 39.3 °C | 7 % | 49 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 64 |
| 16 Aug after | 38.6 °C | 9 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 62 |
| 17 Aug after | 30.4 °C | 28 % | 46 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 40 |
| 18 Aug after | 30.4 °C | 33 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 32 |
| 19 Aug after | 30.8 °C | 30 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 36 |
| 20 Aug after | 32.9 °C | 22 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 39 |
| 21 Aug after | 35.7 °C | 16 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 43 |
| 22 Aug after | 35.7 °C | 15 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 23 Aug after | 37.4 °C | 12 % | 39 km/h | 0.1 mm | Extreme 67 |
| 24 Aug after | 34.0 °C | 18 % | 40 km/h | 0.4 mm | Extreme 56 |
| 25 Aug after | 31.7 °C | 32 % | 50 km/h | 0.2 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 12 August 2021 the air beside the fire reached 40 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 32: 2.2 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 · 194Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 1,093 haMesselmounAugust 2022 · 2 days · 11 km away
- 1,209 haMesselmoun25 July 2020 · 5 days · 17 km away
- 1,022 haAribJuly 2017 · 4 days · 19 km away
- 1,368 haGouraya قورايةNovember 2020 · 1 day · 20 km away
- 844 haMesselmounSeptember 2020 · 4 days · 21 km away
- 2,102 haMesselmounNovember 2025 · 2 days · 23 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the El Amra fire last?
- Copernicus dates it between 11 August 2021 and 15 August 2021: 5 days between the first and last image with fire.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 3,363 hectares (33.6 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered El Amra (3,372 ha, 19 %).
- Did the fire reach a town?
- The fire started in El Amra and came within 4.2 km of its centre. 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 41.6 °C, humidity dropped to 6 % and gusts hit 54 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 95, class Very 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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 194 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.
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.