Fires threaten the historic city of Dubrovnik
5 August 2007 00:00 UTC
On 5 August 2007, during strong Bora winds, several fires broke out in the Dubrovnik-Neretva County.
25 May 2022
05 August 2007
By Jochen Kerkmann (EUMETSAT)
The fire crossed Žarkovica, a couple of hundred metres from the first city houses. The most desperate situation was around Mokošica, where the fire reached the houses.
After the July 2007 heat wave, which entirely covered Southern and Eastern Europe (see Europe battered by weather extremes), the drought and strong winds helped spread fires all over the Croatian coast, destroying a large part of its fragile plant and animal life. According to Wikipedia, in total, there were 750 fires on the coast from 1 June to 8 August, which burned in Istria County, Zadar County, Šibenik-Knin County, the Split-Dalmatia County and the Dubrovnik-Neretva County. The total burned area covered 159,000 hectares.
The AVHRR image below shows, besides numerous smaller fires in Italy, a bigger area of hot pixels around Dubrovnik. For comparison, the Meteosat-9 IR3.9 image from 20:00 UTC (see image under additional content) does not show the hot spots, probably because the area was partly covered by clouds. This demonstrated that a higher spatial resolution (or better, a smaller field of view) is crucial for hot spot detection in partly cloudy scenes. Finally, the large smoke plume from the fires can be seen in Meteosat-9 RGB composite below. It also nicely shows the cloud distribution of this Bora situation, namely low-level clouds inland (e.g. in Sarajewo), with some mountain waves, and a mainly cloud-free coastal zone.
Animation (11:45–16:45 UTC)
Additional content
Met-9 IR3.9 image (20:00 UTC)
Met-9 enhanced HRV image (16:45 UTC)
