Fire near Carlentini (IT)

37.23°N, 14.97°E · first detected on 21 July at 13:08

What the satellites measured

This fire was tracked from 21 July at 13:08 to 24 July at 13:17, that is 3 days, through 138 satellite detections. The detected extent reaches 2,306 ha.

Detected extent
2,306 ha
Cumulative power
3,594 MW
Peak power
672 MW
Detections
138

“Detected extent” is not “burned area”: it is the union of the ground footprints of the satellite pixels, and a 375 m pixel counts in full even when only a forest edge is burning. Compared with press figures it is in practice one and a half to three times the area reported. Detections taken at the edge of the scan swath, too coarse to measure anything at all, are excluded. These figures come from thermal satellite detection and are not an official assessment: only the local fire and civil protection authorities are authoritative.

Replay how the fire spread

The map is centred on this fire and loads only its detections. The timeline below covers the whole fire, from the first satellite pass to the last. “1 h” shows what is burning within an hour of the chosen moment : the map then follows the power curve below and empties when it falls. “12 h” stacks twelve hours , as the home map does, where stacking avoids an empty screen between two satellite passes. Both are true, but they say different things.

The detected extent

Outline of the burned area near Carlentini (IT), drawn over satellite imagery
The outline is the union of the ground footprints of every satellite detection of this fire, from the first pass to the last. The background is the EOX cloudless Sentinel-2 mosaic, 2024 vintage: it shows the landscape BEFORE these fires, not the burn scar.

The spread, pass after pass

  1. Carlentini (IT) seen by Sentinel-2 on 20 July

    20 July

    before the fire

  2. Carlentini (IT) seen by Sentinel-2 on 22 July

    22 July

    during

  3. Carlentini (IT) seen by Sentinel-2 on 25 July

    25 July

    after

One image per usable Sentinel-2 pass, on the same framing throughout so that the comparison means something. The satellite comes back every two to five days and clouds rule out some of the passes: the gaps in the series are days without an image, not days without fire.

How the radiative power evolved

One point per satellite pass: the sum of the fire radiative power measured over the fire. This is the curve that says whether the fire eased off or picked up again, which no cumulative figure shows. The window covers 30 days; beyond that, clustering would merge two successive fires in the same place.

Fire dynamics

Loading history…

Satellite passes in detail

PassPowerDetectionsSensor
24 July at 13:174 MW1N21
22 July at 14:4629 MW5N20
22 July at 14:2769 MW6N
22 July at 13:5338 MW3N21
22 July at 13:08109 MW12N20
22 July at 04:3447 MW1Aqua
22 July at 03:2633 MW7N20
22 July at 03:0750 MW15N
22 July at 02:3353 MW9N21
21 July at 21:1523 MW2Terra
21 July at 16:351,211 MW5Aqua
21 July at 15:08772 MW31N20
21 July at 14:49606 MW17N
21 July at 14:12393 MW15N21
21 July at 13:25117 MW5N20
21 July at 13:0841 MW4N
16 July at 14:0611 MW1N21

Follow live

The map shows active fires in 3D, with smoke plumes, forecast wind, drop zones and the live position of the Canadair, Dash 8 and Air Tractor aircraft of the French Sécurité civile.

Open the fire map

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