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 mapped area changed over the days. The overlaid outline places a city at the same location for comparison, preserving its true area so the order of magnitude becomes directly legible.

This is a selection: five fires for which Copernicus has published a mapping with at least two acquisitions. More of Europe is burning than is shown here.

How to read the figures

Timestamp

Acquisition time of the underlying satellite scene, not the time of publication. All times in Central European Summer Time.

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 several hours to days. Each vertical mark is one acquisition; their spacing shows how densely the fire was mapped. Playback speed follows the same spacing.

Between two acquisitions

Timestamp and area figure are carried forward linearly. A presentational aid, not a measurement — what happened between two overpasses cannot be known from this data.

The red area therefore changes only at an acquisition, never in between: it shows what has been mapped, and grows in steps. While morphing, a thin line additionally travels across the map — the computed path of the outline from one state to the next. It can move inward, because the intermediate shapes are calculated rather than observed; the burnt area does not.

Area figure

Sum of all mapped patches for that state. How change is shown depends on the fire: where one contiguous area dominates, its outline is morphed from state to state. Where the fire breaks into many separate patches, each state is faded in as a whole and stays — morphing would suggest standstill there while the total area grows. The second case currently applies to most of the fires.

When the area shrinks

This happens. Burnt area does not disappear again, but mapped area can: a later assessment delineates more precisely and excludes unburnt islands counted before. The figure may therefore fall while the red area on the map stays unchanged.

City comparison

The dark blue line is the city outline. It is moved to the fire location and keeps its area — not its shape. Because a degree of longitude is shorter at higher latitudes, the east-west extent is corrected; for distant cities that compresses the outline by more than a fifth. It works as a measure of area, not as a city street plan. On opening, the city closest to the fire is shown; the list offers a different one, or none at all.

Sources and licences

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

The source code of this application is published under the MIT licence, code at github.com/marcomaas/fire. The data carry their own licences, listed above — they do not follow the licence of the code.

It builds on Yosemite Rim Fire by OpenDataCity (2013). The algorithm for morphing the outlines is carried over unchanged from that version. Data source, basemap, design, timeline and the second display mode were built in 2026 because the original services have been shut down.

This page embeds no analytics and sets no cookies itself. The map tiles are loaded from Esri, however — a third party thus learns the IP address of the request. Whether that requires consent is a question for the embedding page, not for us.

Publisher and responsible for the content: Datenfreunde imprint

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