Yüksekova fire, 1 September 2018 Yüksekova
The fire started on 1 September 2018 in Yüksekova, Türkiye, and satellites saw it burning for 1 day. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 150 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 73th largest in Hakkâri since 2016 (of 111 with a page). Number 66 in Türkiye in 2018, of 104.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 150ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- 1day
- 1 Sept 2018 – 1 Sept 2018
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- districts
- Started on
- 1 Sept
- 2018
- Heat detections
- 10
- in a single hotspot: 0 MW
- Average daily power
- 381MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
1 Sept 2018 · 381 MW · 10
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
This area had burned before
No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.
What happened to each town
-
150 ha0.1 %
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
- Scrub and transitional woodland84 %
- Other natural land16 %
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 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
- 1,500 haAl-Amadiya1 August 2019 · 5 days · 13 km away
- 1,725 haAl-AmadiyaSeptember 2020 · 11 days · 16 km away
- 1,492 haYüksekova7 November 2021 · 7 days · 27 km away
- 1,473 haAl-AmadiyaJuly 2019 · 5 days · 31 km away
- 1,623 haAl-AmadiyaSeptember 2017 · 5 days · 34 km away
- 1,649 haŞemdinliMay 2021 · 8 days · 35 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Yüksekova fire last?
- Copernicus dates it between 1 September 2018 and 1 September 2018: 1 day between the first and last image with fire.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 150 hectares (1.5 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Yüksekova (150 ha, 0.1 %).
- Did the fire reach a town?
- The fire started in Yüksekova and came within 28.2 km of its centre. 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.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Türkiye (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 · 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: 26 August 2018 → 1 September 2018.
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.
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.