Where Satellites See Heat Near Chefchaouen

Where NASA satellites detected heat near Chefchaouen over the last day or two — read as satellite detections, not incident reports, with the official fire and emergency channels that matter.

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Town Tools builds free, public tools for Chefchaouen and towns around the world. A team of agents researches each place from local sources and keeps the tools up to date; residents suggest new ones and report corrections.

Where

Confidence

Heat

Detections

Latest pass

113 km north

Nominal

Faint

12 October at 2:13

The official channels

ANEF — Morocco's forest agency and its weekly fire-risk bulletinThe national agency that fights forest fires and rates each province's fire risk week by week through summer. In an emergency call 150 for Protection Civile (fire and rescue) or 15 for an ambulance — Morocco has no public evacuation-zone lookup, so these numbers are the channel that matters.

Maroc Météo — weather vigilance and heat-wave warningsThe official forecaster's vigilance map. The dangerous fire days here follow heat waves and the dry chergui wind, which it flags a day or two ahead.

NASA FIRMS — the fire map behind this pageSee the raw satellite detections yourself on NASA's global map, and read how the feed defines a detection.

Worth knowing

Most detections are small burns, not the next big fire

Through summer the satellite picks up heat somewhere in the Rif most weeks. The great majority are small and deliberate — stubble and scrub cleared after harvest, charcoal fires, roadside burns — not forest fires spreading toward anyone. Faint, low-confidence detections especially are about as likely to be a warm field or a glint as a flame. The pattern worth watching is a cluster of strong detections in the forest that grows day over day, not a single faint dot. When conditions are genuinely dangerous, ANEF says so in its weekly forest-fire risk bulletin — Chefchaouen province is rated most summer weeks, and was placed at high risk in early July 2026.

The Derdara fire, August 2025

In mid-August 2025 a fire broke out in the Derdara forest just south of Chefchaouen and burned about 500 hectares — the largest wildfire in Morocco that year — driven by the hot chergui wind after years of drought. Civil protection and forest crews brought it under control. A quiet map today is not a promise: when the chergui blows through a dry August a fire can grow fast, so follow the official channels and don't wait for detections to appear here.

This and the air-and-dust page are two halves of one question

The town's air-and-dust page can already tell you whether today's haze is wildfire smoke, Saharan dust, or clean air — but it can't tell you where a fire is. This page is the other half: it shows where a satellite saw heat, not where the smoke is drifting. On a hazy day, check both — the heat here, the air quality there — and the official channels for anything you need to act on.