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Tamza fire, 4 July 2021 طامزة · Tamza, Kais

Out · last detection 6 Jul 2021, 01:35 UTC

The fire started on 4 July 2021 in Tamza, Algeria, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 920 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 2 municipalities.

Number 23 in Algeria in 2021, of 92.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Tamza · 2021Tamza · 2021El Hamma · 2026Babar · 2021

Burnt area
920ha
Copernicus perimeter
Duration
3days
4 Jul 2021 – 6 Jul 2021
Municipalities hit
2
communes
Started on
4 Jul
2021
Heat detections
55
in a single hotspot: 81 MW
Danger at start
81
Very extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
314MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 4 Jul6 Jul
6 Jul 2021

How it evolved, day by day

4 Jul 2021 · 809 MW · 29 5 Jul 2021 · 115 MW · 22 6 Jul 2021 · 17 MW · 4
4 Jul 5 Jul 6 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

40°high
66km/h · peak gust
5%lowest humidity

It had gone 27 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.0 mm on 13 Jul.

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 0.6% of the area of London (9.2 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. Tamza طامزة 8,617 inhabitants · 16.6 km from the centre where it started
    915 ha reached on 4 Jul
    1.9 %
  2. Kais قايس 28,724 inhabitants · 4.8 km from the centre
    8 ha reached on 4 Jul
    0.1 %

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

  • Mixed forest88 %
  • Other natural land10 %
  • Agricultural areas0.8 %
  • Broadleaved forest0.7 %

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)
4 Jul 39.2 °C 6 % 66 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 81
5 Jul 38.1 °C 9 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
6 Jul 39.5 °C 5 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
7 Jul after 38.0 °C 9 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 67
8 Jul after 36.4 °C 11 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
9 Jul after 36.6 °C 12 % 52 km/h 0.4 mm Extreme 68
10 Jul after 38.2 °C 8 % 65 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 73
11 Jul after 36.2 °C 10 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 64
12 Jul after 38.0 °C 7 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 69
13 Jul after 36.5 °C 9 % 62 km/h 1.0 mm Extreme 67

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 27 Jun 2021
After · 13 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.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 7 July 2021 the air beside the fire reached 56 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 43: 2.9 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak56 µg/m³
Days over the guideline8 days
PM10170 µg/m³
23456789
Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

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 · 55Every 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 Algeria ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Tamza fire last?
Copernicus dates it between 4 July 2021 and 6 July 2021: 3 days between the first and last image with fire.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 920 hectares (9.2 km²). Official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Tamza (915 ha, 1.9 %); Kais (8 ha, 0.1 %).
Did the fire reach a town?
The fire came within 4.8 km of the centre of Kais, the closest of the areas it touched. 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 39.5 °C, humidity dropped to 5 % and gusts hit 66 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 81, class Very extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Algeria (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: 14 · 1021 · 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 14 · 1021.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 55 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.

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 ADM3 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0). 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.