Ovruch fire, 16 April 2020 Овруцький район · Ovruch
The fire started on 16 April 2020 in Ovruch, Ukraine, and satellites saw it burning for 8 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 27,244 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.
It is the largest fire in Zhytomyr Oblast since 2016 (of 179 with a page). Number 2 in Ukraine in 2020, of 132.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 27,244ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- 8days
- 16 Apr 2020 – 23 Apr 2020
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- districts
- Started on
- 16 Apr
- 2020
- Heat detections
- 1,650
- in a single hotspot: 356 MW
- Danger at start
- 25
- High · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 1.8GW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
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 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.8 mm on 25 Apr.
This area had burned before
No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Kyiv boundary: geoBoundaries · OpenStreetMap, Wambacher · © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 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
-
26,632 ha reached on 16 Apr11 %
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 forest70 %
- Mixed forest26 %
- Other natural land2.7 %
- Broadleaved forest0.6 %
- Agricultural areas0.6 %
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 0.80 hectares of built-up land and about 50 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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16 Apr | 17.5 °C | 27 % | 82 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 25 |
| 17 Apr | 12.0 °C | 21 % | 58 km/h | 0.2 mm | High 22 |
| 18 Apr | 10.2 °C | 25 % | 44 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 18 |
| 19 Apr | 11.5 °C | 26 % | 48 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 19 |
| 20 Apr | 9.1 °C | 34 % | 45 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 18 |
| 21 Apr | 10.5 °C | 31 % | 41 km/h | 0.1 mm | Moderate 18 |
| 22 Apr | 16.3 °C | 21 % | 46 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 22 |
| 23 Apr | 18.8 °C | 18 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 24 |
| 24 Apr after | 19.4 °C | 19 % | 55 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 29 |
| 25 Apr after | 19.3 °C | 27 % | 37 km/h | 1.8 mm | Low 8 |
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 16 April 2020 the air beside the fire reached 36 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 · 1,650Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 45,987 haNarodychi Народицький район3 April 2020 · 18 days · 14 km away
- 1,660 haNarodychi Народицький район16 March 2022 · 8 days · 25 km away
- 1,204 haNarodychi Народицький район22 March 2022 · 8 days · 32 km away
- 4,505 haPoliske Поліський район5 September 2024 · 6 days · 35 km away
- 2,792 haNarodychi Народицький район16 March 2022 · 8 days · 35 km away
- 1,284 haOvruch Овруцький район29 April 2020 · 3 days · 39 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Ovruch fire last?
- According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 16 April 2020 to 23 April 2020 (8 days). The perimeter dates it from 16 April 2020 to 22 April 2020.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 27,244 hectares (272.4 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Ovruch (26,632 ha, 11 %).
- Did the fire reach a town?
- The fire started in Ovruch and came within 15.9 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 18.8 °C, humidity dropped to 18 % and gusts hit 82 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 25, 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.
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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 16 April 2020 to 22 April 2020. 1,650 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 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.