Ovruch fire, 16 April 2020 Овруцький район · Ovruch
The fire started on 16 April 2020 in Ovruch, Ukraine, and satellites saw it burning for 4 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 725 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 31th largest in Zhytomyr Oblast since 2016 (of 179 with a page). Number 49 in Ukraine in 2020, of 132.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 725ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- 4days
- 16 Apr 2020 – 19 Apr 2020
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- districts
- Started on
- 16 Apr
- 2020
- Heat detections
- 28
- in a single hotspot: 63 MW
- Danger at start
- 29
- High · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 165MW
- 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 one day without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.4 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
-
723 ha reached on 16 Apr0.3 %
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 forest49 %
- Mixed forest33 %
- Agricultural areas9.5 %
- Other natural land8.4 %
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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16 Apr | 18.4 °C | 22 % | 78 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 29 |
| 17 Apr | 12.4 °C | 19 % | 54 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 24 |
| 18 Apr | 10.8 °C | 23 % | 44 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 20 |
| 19 Apr | 12.2 °C | 23 % | 47 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 21 |
| 20 Apr after | 9.3 °C | 32 % | 46 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 20 |
| 21 Apr after | 10.7 °C | 29 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 19 |
| 22 Apr after | 16.5 °C | 20 % | 46 km/h | 0.2 mm | High 23 |
| 23 Apr after | 18.9 °C | 18 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 24 |
| 24 Apr after | 19.6 °C | 18 % | 52 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 29 |
| 25 Apr after | 19.1 °C | 29 % | 40 km/h | 1.4 mm | Low 11 |
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 18 April 2020 the air beside the fire reached 30 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 · 28Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 27,244 haOvruch Овруцький район16 April 2020 · 8 days · 10 km away
- 45,987 haNarodychi Народицький район3 April 2020 · 18 days · 22 km away
- 1,660 haNarodychi Народицький район16 March 2022 · 8 days · 25 km away
- 8,406 haOvruch Овруцький район16 April 2020 · 6 days · 30 km away
- 1,082 haOvruch Овруцький район16 April 2020 · 7 days · 30 km away
- 1,204 haNarodychi Народицький район22 March 2022 · 8 days · 33 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Ovruch fire last?
- Copernicus dates it between 16 April 2020 and 19 April 2020: 4 days between the first and last image with fire.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 725 hectares (7.2 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Ovruch (723 ha, 0.3 %).
- Did the fire reach a town?
- The fire started in Ovruch and came within 5.6 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 18.4 °C, humidity dropped to 19 % and gusts hit 78 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 29, 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.
- Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 28 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.
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.