Sambir fire, April 2021 Самбірський район · Ukraine
The fire started on 1 April 2021 in Sambir, Ukraine, and satellites saw it burning for 1 day. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 601 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.
This entry is probably an agricultural burn of stubble, meadow or peatland, not a wildfire. Before the war, stubble and meadows in Ukraine were burnt every spring and autumn, and the fire often got out of hand. This is our assumption, based on the time of year, ground with almost no woodland and the lack of news about this fire; it is not confirmed. That is why it is left out of the wildfire rankings.
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- Burnt area
- 601ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- 1day
- 1 Apr 2021 – 1 Apr 2021
- Municipalities hit
- 0
- districts
- Started on
- 1 Apr
- 2021
- Heat detections
- 15
- in a single hotspot: 0 MW
- Average daily power
- 138MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
1 Apr 2021 · 138 MW · 15
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
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 burned
- Other natural land85 %
- Mixed forest7.8 %
- Agricultural areas4.0 %
- Broadleaved forest3.0 %
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 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
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.
Detections table · 0Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 1,146 haSambir Самбірський районMarch 2020 · 11 days · 1 km away
- 865 haSambir Самбірський район14 March 2026 · 5 days · 1 km away
- 530 haDrohobych Дрогобицький район22 February 2025 · 4 days · 6 km away
- 452 haDrohobych Дрогобицький район20 October 2021 · 6 days · 8 km away
- 1,006 haDrohobych Дрогобицький район28 January 2025 · 6 days · 11 km away
- 394 haDrohobych Дрогобицький районFebruary 2024 · 3 days · 11 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Sambir fire last?
- Copernicus dates it between 1 April 2021 and 1 April 2021: 1 day between the first and last image with fire.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 601 hectares (6.0 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
- Start date: 29 March 2021 → 1 April 2021.
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. No Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
- We have not matched this page with any official record.
- 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.
- Probably a vegetation burn: not counted in the totals.
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.