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جومين fire, August 2023 جومين

Out · last detection 29 Aug 2023, 12:56 UTC

The fire started on 27 August 2023 in جومين, Tunisia, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 408 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 7th largest in Bizerte since 2016 (of 39 with a page). Number 4 in Tunisia in 2023, of 10.

The power measured by the satellite is low (13.9 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…
Burnt area
408ha
Copernicus perimeter
Duration
3days
27 Aug 2023 – 29 Aug 2023
Municipalities hit
1
delegations
Started on
27 Aug
2023
Heat detections
10
in a single hotspot: 14 MW
Danger at start
71
Very extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
18MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 27 Aug29 Aug
29 Aug 2023

How it evolved, day by day

27 Aug 2023 · 2 MW · 1 28 Aug 2023 · 14 MW · 4 29 Aug 2023 · 40 MW · 5
27 Aug 28 Aug 29 Aug

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

The weather it burned in

41°high
65km/h · peak gust
15%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

5% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 19 ha in 2020.

What happened to each town

  1. جومين where it started
    409 ha reached on 27 Aug
    0.7 %

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

  • Coniferous forest52 %
  • Sclerophyllous scrub28 %
  • Agricultural areas18 %
  • Other land cover1.0 %
  • Scrub and transitional woodland0.7 %

Land cover inside the perimeter as reported by Copernicus EFFIS (outside the Corine Land Cover area).

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2025
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2025, 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. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.

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)
27 Aug 41.4 °C 15 % 52 km/h 0.1 mm Very extreme 71
28 Aug 25.2 °C 46 % 65 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
29 Aug 25.1 °C 60 % 57 km/h 2.3 mm Moderate 12
30 Aug after 28.6 °C 39 % 36 km/h 0.1 mm Moderate 21
31 Aug after 28.4 °C 44 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
1 Sept after 30.4 °C 30 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
2 Sept after 35.1 °C 28 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
3 Sept after 32.9 °C 36 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
4 Sept after 30.5 °C 37 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
5 Sept after 28.0 °C 39 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
6 Sept after 27.5 °C 48 % 40 km/h 0.3 mm High 29
7 Sept after 28.1 °C 40 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
8 Sept after 28.2 °C 43 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 26

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 20 Aug 2023
After · 5 Sept 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 26 August 2023 the air beside the fire reached 25 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak25 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1024 µg/m³
Optical depth0.53
252627282930311
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 · 10Every 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 Tunisia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the جومين fire last?
Copernicus dates it between 27 August 2023 and 29 August 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 408 hectares (4.1 km²). Official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered جومين (409 ha, 0.7 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 41.4 °C, humidity dropped to 15 % and gusts hit 65 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 71, class Very extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Tunisia (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: 198 · 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.

Report an error
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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 198.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 10 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 2025, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.

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 (Open Data Commons Open Database License 1.0). 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.