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مرناق fire, July 2022 مرناق, حمام الشط, حمام الأنف

Out · last detection 22 Jul 2022, 12:11 UTC

The fire started on 19 July 2022 in مرناق, Tunisia, and satellites saw it burning for 4 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 746 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 3 municipalities.

Number 3 in Tunisia in 2022, of 23.

The power measured by the satellite is low (27.0 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: قرمبالية · 2021مرناق · 2022زغوان · 2022تاكلسة · 2017

Burnt area
746ha
Copernicus perimeter
Duration
4days
19 Jul 2022 – 22 Jul 2022
Municipalities hit
3
delegations
Started on
19 Jul
2022
Heat detections
25
in a single hotspot: 27 MW
Danger at start
38
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
70MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 19 Jul22 Jul
22 Jul 2022

How it evolved, day by day

20 Jul 2022 · 129 MW · 17 21 Jul 2022 · 14 MW · 3 22 Jul 2022 · 66 MW · 5
20 Jul 21 Jul 22 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

33°high
42km/h · peak gust
33%lowest humidity

It had gone 51 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 0.5% of the area of London (7.5 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. مرناق where it started
    407 ha reached on 20 Jul
    1.0 %
  2. حمام الشط
    221 ha reached on 20 Jul
    8.4 %
  3. حمام الأنف
    119 ha
    10 %

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 forest57 %
  • Other natural land28 %
  • Scrub and transitional woodland14 %
  • Agricultural areas0.8 %

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

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2020
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (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)
19 Jul 33.4 °C 33 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
20 Jul 32.8 °C 38 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
21 Jul 32.3 °C 42 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
22 Jul 32.4 °C 35 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
23 Jul after 32.9 °C 38 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
24 Jul after 33.1 °C 35 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
25 Jul after 33.8 °C 32 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
26 Jul after 33.9 °C 30 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
27 Jul after 32.7 °C 43 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
28 Jul after 31.3 °C 49 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
29 Jul after 32.8 °C 50 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
30 Jul after 32.1 °C 50 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
31 Jul after 31.1 °C 43 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
1 Aug after 31.4 °C 45 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 32

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 12 Jul 2022
After · 29 Jul 2022

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

Detections table · 25Every 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 مرناق fire last?
Copernicus dates it between 19 July 2022 and 22 July 2022: 4 days between the first and last image with fire.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 746 hectares (7.5 km²). Official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 3 municipalities: مرناق (407 ha, 1.0 %); حمام الشط (221 ha, 8.4 %); حمام الأنف (119 ha, 10 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 33.4 °C, humidity dropped to 33 % and gusts hit 42 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 39, class Very high.
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
What do you think is wrong?

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. 25 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.

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.