Golan fire, 4 July 2024 Golan
The fire started on 4 July 2024 in Golan, Israel, and satellites saw it burning for 2 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 995 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.
Number 3 in Israel in 2024, of 40.
Compare with…
Suggestions: Golan · 2023Golan · 2024Golan · 2024Golan · 2024
- Burnt area
- 995ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- 2days
- 4 Jul 2024 – 5 Jul 2024
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- subdistricts
- Started on
- 4 Jul
- 2024
- Heat detections
- 20
- in a single hotspot: 93 MW
- Danger at start
- 38
- High · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 328MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
4 Jul 2024 · 328 MW · 20
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 10 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.1 mm on 15 Jul.
This area had burned before
1% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 3 ha in 2017, 12 ha in 2018, 1 ha in 2023. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 12 ha that had burned before.
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Tel Aviv (district) boundary: geoBoundaries · geoBoundaries, Wikimedia Commons (CC0 1.0).
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
-
Golan where it started997 ha reached on 4 Jul0.9 %
Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the official perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance is from the town centre to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.
What burned
- Agricultural areas81 %
- Other natural land18 %
- Artificial surfaces1.0 %
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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 Jul | 36.6 °C | 28 % | 42 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 38 |
| 5 Jul | 35.7 °C | 26 % | 47 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 42 |
| 6 Jul after | 32.6 °C | 45 % | 46 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 35 |
| 7 Jul after | 33.2 °C | 50 % | 49 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 32 |
| 8 Jul after | 34.9 °C | 44 % | 48 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 32 |
| 9 Jul after | 36.3 °C | 40 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 32 |
| 10 Jul after | 37.6 °C | 31 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 37 |
| 11 Jul after | 38.0 °C | 21 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 45 |
| 12 Jul after | 37.6 °C | 29 % | 50 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 48 |
| 13 Jul after | 35.6 °C | 35 % | 50 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 14 Jul after | 32.9 °C | 49 % | 52 km/h | 0.2 mm | High 35 |
| 15 Jul after | 34.2 °C | 50 % | 46 km/h | 1.1 mm | High 24 |
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 8 July 2024 the air beside the fire reached 17 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO 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 · 20Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Golan fire last?
- Copernicus dates it between 4 July 2024 and 5 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 995 hectares (10.0 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Golan (997 ha, 0.9 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 36.6 °C, humidity dropped to 26 % and gusts hit 47 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 42, class Very high.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Israel (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: 102
Satellite cross-check
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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
- Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 20 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 ADM2 (CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication). 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.