Medjez Sfa fire, August 2022 مجاز الصفاء · Hammam Beni Salah, Medjez Sfa, Boucheghouf
The fire started on 17 August 2022 in Medjez Sfa, Algeria, and satellites saw it burning for 2 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 3,193 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 3 municipalities.
It is the 2th largest in Souk Ahras since 2016 (of 33 with a page). Number 4 in Algeria in 2022, of 58.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 3,193ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- 2days
- 17 Aug 2022 – 18 Aug 2022
- Municipalities hit
- 3
- communes
- Started on
- 17 Aug
- 2022
- Heat detections
- 120
- in a single hotspot: 809 MW
- Danger at start
- 71
- Very extreme · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 10.2GW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
17 Aug 2022 · 10,163 MW · 120
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 40 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.0 mm on 19 Aug.
This area had burned before
39% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 454 ha in 2017, 434 ha in 2019, 296 ha in 2020, 103 ha in 2021.
- 353 ha Hammam Beni Salah fire, August 2019 352 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 267 ha Medjez Sfa fire, August 2020 731 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 209 ha Hammam Beni Salah fire, July 2017 633 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 158 ha Boucheghouf fire, September 2017 193 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 103 ha Beni Salah fire, August 2021 5,857 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 80 ha Hammam Beni Salah fire, August 2019 173 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 19 ha Hammam Beni Salah fire, July 2017 109 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 5 ha Medjez Sfa fire, August 2020 208 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
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
-
1,449 ha reached on 17 Aug6.9 %
-
1,253 ha reached on 17 Aug8.9 %
-
497 ha reached on 17 Aug2.5 %
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 forest71 %
- Other natural land24 %
- Broadleaved forest4.3 %
Land cover inside the perimeter as reported by Copernicus EFFIS (outside the Corine Land Cover area).
People and buildings inside the perimeter
GHSL 2020Inside the perimeter there were about 0.53 hectares of built-up land and about 60 residents (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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 17 Aug | 42.2 °C | 9 % | 66 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very extreme 71 |
| 18 Aug | 32.2 °C | 36 % | 46 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 43 |
| 19 Aug after | 28.4 °C | 38 % | 45 km/h | 1.0 mm | High 27 |
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 17 August 2022 the air beside the fire reached 32 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 18: 1.2 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 · 120Every 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 Medjez Sfa fire last?
- Copernicus dates it between 17 August 2022 and 18 August 2022: 2 days between the first and last image with fire.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 3,193 hectares (31.9 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 3 municipalities: Hammam Beni Salah (1,449 ha, 6.9 %); Medjez Sfa (1,253 ha, 8.9 %); Boucheghouf (497 ha, 2.5 %).
- Did the fire reach a town?
- The fire came within 3.5 km of the centre of Hammam Beni Salah, 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 42.2 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 66 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 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. 120 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.
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.