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Taza fire, July 2022 إقليم تازة · Taza

Out · last detection 16 Jul 2022, 14:04 UTC

The fire started on 14 July 2022 in Taza, Morocco, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 1,689 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.

It is the largest fire in Fez-Meknes since 2016 (of 20 with a page). Number 3 in Morocco in 2022, of 22.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Taza · 2017Taza · 2023Taza · 2023Sefrou · 2021

Burnt area
1,689ha
Copernicus perimeter
Duration
3days
14 Jul 2022 – 16 Jul 2022
Municipalities hit
1
provinces
Started on
14 Jul
2022
Heat detections
95
in a single hotspot: 164 MW
Danger at start
69
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
835MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 14 Jul16 Jul
16 Jul 2022

How it evolved, day by day

14 Jul 2022 · 1,626 MW · 31 15 Jul 2022 · 836 MW · 58 16 Jul 2022 · 42 MW · 6
14 Jul 15 Jul 16 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

37°high
62km/h · peak gust
10%lowest humidity

It had gone 21 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.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1.1% of the area of London (17 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. Taza إقليم تازة where it started
    1,688 ha reached on 14 Jul
    0.3 %

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

  • Broadleaved forest73 %
  • Scrub and transitional woodland12 %
  • Agricultural areas8.4 %
  • Mixed forest5.5 %

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)
14 Jul 35.2 °C 10 % 62 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 69
15 Jul 36.3 °C 10 % 57 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
16 Jul 37.1 °C 10 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
17 Jul after 38.5 °C 8 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
18 Jul after 38.4 °C 9 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
19 Jul after 36.2 °C 15 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
20 Jul after 38.6 °C 10 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
21 Jul after 36.3 °C 12 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
22 Jul after 37.7 °C 12 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
23 Jul after 38.7 °C 9 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
24 Jul after 39.1 °C 9 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
25 Jul after 39.0 °C 11 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
26 Jul after 35.3 °C 11 % 56 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 7 Jul 2022
After · 23 Jul 2022

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 12 July 2022 the air beside the fire reached 24 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak24 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1067 µg/m³
1213141516171819
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 · 95Every 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 Morocco ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Taza fire last?
Copernicus dates it between 14 July 2022 and 16 July 2022: 3 days between the first and last image with fire.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 1,689 hectares (16.9 km²). Official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Taza (1,688 ha, 0.3 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 37.1 °C, humidity dropped to 10 % and gusts hit 62 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 69, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Morocco (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: 15 · 150 · 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 15 · 150.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 95 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.