Wildfires in France and Spain

What this map shows

The red area is the mapped burnt area as assessed from satellite imagery by the Copernicus Emergency Management Service. The sequence moves from one acquisition to the next, showing how the fire expanded over the days. The white outline places a city at the same location for comparison, preserving its true area so the order of magnitude becomes directly legible.

How to read the figures

Timestamp

Acquisition time of the underlying satellite scene, not the time of publication.

Timeline

The axis is proportional to real time and starts at the reported outbreak (triangle), not at the first acquisition. The hatched section is the interval between outbreak and first satellite acquisition — nothing is mapped there, so the animation cannot show it. Depending on the fire that is 21 to 106 hours. Each vertical mark is one acquisition; their spacing shows how densely the fire was mapped. Playback speed follows the same spacing.

Movement between two acquisitions

Linearly interpolated. This is a presentational aid: what happened between two overpasses cannot be known from this data.

Area figure

Sum of all mapped patches for that state. Where one contiguous area dominates, its outline is morphed; where the fire is scattered across many patches, each state is faded in as a whole instead.

City comparison

The outline is moved to the fire location while keeping its actual area. Because a degree of longitude is shorter at higher latitudes, the east-west extent is corrected accordingly.

Sources and licences

Fire perimeters: Copernicus EMS Rapid Mapping, © European Union.
City boundaries: OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.
Relief basemap: Esri.

This application is published under CC BY 3.0. Source code: github.com/marcomaas/fire.

It builds on Yosemite Rim Fire by OpenDataCity (2013). The morphing animation is carried over unchanged from that version; data source, basemap and design were renewed in 2026 because the original services have been shut down.

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Publisher and responsible for the content: Datenfreunde imprint

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