Wildfires in Greece: Highest land area burned in 13 years

The highest levels of burned areas from forest fires in the last thirteen years, at the end of July, was recorded by the award-winning FireHub service system of the BEYOND Operational Unit of the Institute for Astronomy, Astrophysics, Space Applications, and Remote Sensing

Since Saturday, July 15, the Fire Dept. has been called to intervene in sixty-one (61) serious forest fire incidents. Thirteen (13) of them were large or even very large, while in two cases, in Dervenochoria and Rhodes, the fires continued to spread and develop for several days.

The BEYOND Business Unit of Institute for Astronomy, Astrophysics, Space Applications, and Remote Sensing having developed the award-winning FireHUB service system, offers a range of services for the prediction of fire risk, the monitoring of active fronts in real and near-real time as well as the detailed assessment of burned areas.

Based on data collected by FireHUB and the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) (Table 1), it appears that we are in for a very difficult year for forest fires. Studying the total burned areas in our country, from 2010 to 2023, it was found that the forest fires of the last two weeks have caused a significant increase in burned areas, marking the highest levels recorded at the end of July, in the last 13 years.

In total, around 40,000 hectares have burned, an area almost twice that of last year (2022) and three times that of 2020. The five (5) largest fires that have occurred this year in Greece are the following: On 17/07 three (3) fires broke out in the wider area of Attica: At 12:27 in a forest area in Kouvara Attica, at 14:38 in Kallithea Loutraki and at 17:08 the big fire started in Dervenochoria of Boeotia, which remained active until 20/07. At 21:00 local time, the image of smoke dispersion from these three (3) fires is typical, while it appears that a large volume of microparticles is transported to the southwest (Figure 1). On 18/07 at 19:11 the start of the forest fire was recorded in the area of ‘Embona in Rhodes, while on 23/07 a forest fire broke out in Corfu. Both (2) of these fires remain active as of this time (07:21 AM, 7/25/2023)

Below are FireHUB’s services in the case of the ongoing Rhodes fire. According to the daily risk map, the fire that broke out in Rhodes was in an area that had been classified as a very high risk area for 18/07/2023.

The event was detected by the Real Time Fire Monitoring service and was continuously monitored every 5 minutes on the hour.

The Forest Fire Information System (FFIS) platform of the BEYOND Operational Unit of IAADET/EAA recorded the evolution of active outbreaks in Rhodes (Figure 6), for the period 18/07/2023 – 25/7/2023 after processing satellite images of medium analysis.

The burned area of the fire up to 23/07/2023 and time 12:27, was estimated at approximately 107,170 acres/10,717 hectares. Characteristically, after mapping, a number of new active foci were noted (Figure 7) to the west and east of the burned area, indicating that the foci are scattered and growing rapidly. It is estimated that after the end of the fire, more than 10% of the island will have burned, while a large part of the burned area is within the Natura network.