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تاكلسة fire, July 2021 تاكلسة

Out · last detection 24 Jul 2021, 12:18 UTC

The fire started on 24 July 2021 in تاكلسة, Tunisia, and satellites saw it burning for 1 day. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 102 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.

Number 37 in Tunisia in 2021, of 37.

Compare with…
Burnt area
102ha
Copernicus perimeter
Duration
1day
24 Jul 2021 – 24 Jul 2021
Municipalities hit
1
delegations
Started on
24 Jul
2021
Heat detections
2
in a single hotspot: 40 MW
Danger at start
33
High · FWI index
Average daily power
78MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 24 Jul24 Jul

How it evolved, day by day

24 Jul 2021 · 78 MW · 2

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

32°high
38km/h · peak gust
43%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.

What happened to each town

  1. تاكلسة where it started
    102 ha reached on 24 Jul
    0.4 %

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

  • Sclerophyllous scrub49 %
  • Scrub and transitional woodland42 %
  • Broadleaved forest6.9 %
  • Agricultural areas2.0 %

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)
24 Jul 32.4 °C 43 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
25 Jul after 31.7 °C 48 % 58 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
26 Jul after 30.4 °C 59 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
27 Jul after 29.5 °C 59 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
28 Jul after 31.9 °C 42 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
29 Jul after 35.1 °C 29 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
30 Jul after 35.8 °C 40 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
31 Jul after 35.8 °C 37 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
1 Aug after 35.8 °C 34 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
2 Aug after 30.4 °C 56 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
3 Aug after 32.1 °C 49 % 42 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 · 17 Jul 2021
After · 31 Jul 2021

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 · 2Every 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 تاكلسة fire last?
Copernicus dates it between 24 July 2021 and 24 July 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 102 hectares (1.0 km²). Official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered تاكلسة (102 ha, 0.4 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 32.4 °C, humidity dropped to 43 % and gusts hit 38 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 33, class 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.

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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. 2 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.