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Holo Prystan fire, 9 July 2023 Скадовський район · Holo Prystan

Out · last detection 11 Jul 2023, 11:37 UTC

The fire started on 9 July 2023 in Holo Prystan, Ukraine, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 2,181 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.

We are reviewing this page: some of its data look inconsistent (the place, the dates or the area), so treat them with caution.

The power measured by the satellite is low (21.4 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Holo Prystan · 2021Holo Prystan · 2026Holo Prystan · 2025Holo Prystan · 2024

Burnt area
2,181ha
Copernicus perimeter
Duration
3days
9 Jul 2023 – 11 Jul 2023
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
9 Jul
2023
Heat detections
73
in a single hotspot: 21 MW
Danger at start
22
High · FWI index
Average daily power
201MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 9 Jul11 Jul
11 Jul 2023

How it evolved, day by day

9 Jul 2023 · 68 MW · 17 10 Jul 2023 · 193 MW · 21 11 Jul 2023 · 343 MW · 35
9 Jul 10 Jul 11 Jul

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

27°high
66km/h · peak gust
34%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 11.1 mm on 12 Jul.

This area had burned before

4% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 84 ha in 2021.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1.4% of the area of London (22 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

  1. Holo Prystan Скадовський район 127,000 inhabitants · 52.1 km from the centre where it started
    1 ha reached on 11 Jul
    0.0 %

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

  • Other natural land97 %
  • Agricultural areas1.6 %
  • Other land cover1.4 %

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)
9 Jul 26.3 °C 41 % 66 km/h 0.6 mm High 22
10 Jul 27.1 °C 34 % 45 km/h 0.4 mm High 23
11 Jul 25.3 °C 41 % 44 km/h 6.8 mm Very low 4
12 Jul after 24.4 °C 56 % 40 km/h 11.1 mm Very low 1

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 2 Jul 2023
After · 18 Jul 2023

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 · Copernicus

On 14 July 2023 the air beside the fire reached 16 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak16 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1028 µg/m³
Optical depth0.59
7891011121314
Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

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 · 73Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
⬇ Download CSV Times in UTC. Each detection is a 375 m pixel: a large fire yields hundreds per pass.
Date and timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Ukraine ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Holo Prystan fire last?
Copernicus dates it between 9 July 2023 and 11 July 2023: 3 days between the first and last image with fire.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 2,181 hectares (21.8 km²). Official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Holo Prystan (1 ha, 0.0 %).
Did the fire reach a town?
The fire started in Holo Prystan and came within 52.1 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 27.1 °C, humidity dropped to 34 % and gusts hit 66 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 23, class High.
Where does this data come from?
From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Ukraine (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: 101 · 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.

RSS Changes to this page

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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We will only use your email to reply about this report. Privacy. This is not an emergency service: if there is a fire now, call 101 · 112.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 73 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.

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 ADM2 (Public Domain). 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.