Vescles fire, August 2022 Cernon, Vescles
The fire started on 9 August 2022 in Vescles, France, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 548 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 2 municipalities.
Number 14 in France in 2022, of 49.
Compare with…
Suggestions: Cornod · 2022
- Burnt area
- 548ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- 6days
- 9 Aug 2022 – 14 Aug 2022
- Municipalities hit
- 2
- communes
- Started on
- 9 Aug
- 2022
- Heat detections
- 40
- in a single hotspot: 110 MW
- Danger at start
- 28
- High · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 622MW
- 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 10 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.7 mm on 15 Aug.
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).
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).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
Cernon 235 inhabitants · fire reached the centre374 ha reached on 11 Aug22 %
-
174 ha reached on 11 Aug8.6 %
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 forest80 %
- Other natural land10 %
- Agricultural areas8.9 %
- Artificial surfaces0.7 %
Natura 2000 protected area affected: 100 %
- ZEPA + LIC Petite montagne du Jura FR4301334 · FR4312013
Natura 2000 sites (European Environment Agency, 2024 release) crossed by the perimeter.
Land cover inside the perimeter according to Corine Land Cover, as reported by Copernicus.
People and buildings inside the perimeter
GHSL 2020Inside the perimeter there were about 0.52 hectares of 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
Official record
According to BDIFF, a fire of 700 ha was recorded in Vescles on 9 August 2022 (the satellite measured 548 ha). The record has no coordinates, so it was matched by municipality and date. The two figures differ a lot, so these may not be exactly the same fire: take them as nearby records.
- Vescles 9 August 2022 · 22:56 700 ha
BDIFF (Base de Données sur les Incendies de Forêts en France). This is the agency’s consolidated statistic: it measures the area in its own way, which is why it can differ from the satellite.
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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9 Aug | 31.4 °C | 27 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 28 |
| 10 Aug | 31.8 °C | 26 % | 28 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 28 |
| 11 Aug | 32.2 °C | 26 % | 28 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 28 |
| 12 Aug | 32.2 °C | 21 % | 33 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 31 |
| 13 Aug | 31.5 °C | 20 % | 24 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 33 |
| 14 Aug | 23.0 °C | 47 % | 36 km/h | 3.8 mm | Very low 5 |
| 15 Aug after | 22.9 °C | 59 % | 44 km/h | 2.7 mm | Very low 3 |
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 11 August 2022 the air beside the fire reached 31 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 18: 1.2 times the WHO daily 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 · 40Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Vescles fire last?
- Copernicus dates it between 9 August 2022 and 14 August 2022: 6 days between the first and last image with fire.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 548 hectares (5.5 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 2 municipalities: Cernon (374 ha, 22 %); Vescles (174 ha, 8.6 %).
- Did the fire reach a town?
- The fire reached the centre of Cernon: the point marking it was inside the burnt area or less than 500 metres from it. That does not mean houses burned.
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 32.2 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % 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 France (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: 112 · 18 · 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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
- Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 40 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
- Compared with BDIFF: 700 official ha against 548 ha of perimeter; similar, but with reservations.
- 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.
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 ADM5 (Open Data Commons Attribution 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.