How long did the Ashburton fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 29 October 2023 and 5 November 2023: 8 days between the first and last heat detection of the perimeter.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 21,867 hectares (218.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Ashburton (21,932 ha, 0.2 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 38.6 °C, humidity dropped to 11 % and gusts hit 50 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 72, class Very extreme.

Where does this data come from?

From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Australia (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

AU · Australia · 2023-10-29 → 2023-11-05

Ashburton fire, 29 October 2023 Ashburton

Out · last detection 4 Nov 2023, 17:50 UTC

The fire started on 29 October 2023 in Ashburton, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 8 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 21,867 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 300th largest in Western Australia since 2016 (of 2732 with a page). Number 250 in Australia in 2023, of 1235.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Ashburton · 2017 Ashburton · 2017 Ashburton · 2023 Ashburton · 2019

Burnt area: 21,867ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 8days; 29 Oct 2023 – 5 Nov 2023
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 29 Oct; 2023
Heat detections: 713; in a single hotspot: 162 MW
Danger at start: 63; Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power: 1.2GW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 29 Oct5 Nov

Play back 4 Nov 2023

How it evolved, day by day

29 Oct 30 Oct 31 Oct 1 Nov 2 Nov 3 Nov 4 Nov

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

39°high

50km/h · peak gust

11%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

2% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 471 ha in 2017.

468 ha Ashburton fire, October 2017 12,261 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 14% of the area of London (219 km² against 1,583 km²).

London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).

This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.

What happened to each town

Ashburton where it started

21,932 ha reached on 29 Oct

0.2 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance runs from the point marking the centre of each area to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2025

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2025, satellite-based estimate).

This is an estimate on 100 m cells, made from satellite imagery and census data: it does not mean that homes burned or that anyone was harmed. The perimeter also contains land that never burned. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.

Source: Global Human Settlement Layer (GHS-BUILT-S and GHS-POP R2023A), European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), © European Union, CC BY 4.0. Sum inside the perimeter computed by WorldFires. human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu

The weather day by day

ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, the standard reference for past weather, and the Canadian Fire Weather Index (the same system Copernicus uses), computed by WorldFires from that data. Days after the fire run until the first rain.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)

Day	High	Min. humidity	Peak gust	Rain	Danger (FWI)
29 Oct	36.7 °C	15 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 63
30 Oct	38.6 °C	14 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 65
31 Oct	37.8 °C	11 %	50 km/h	0.0 mm	Very extreme 72
1 Nov	36.5 °C	15 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 66
2 Nov	36.8 °C	16 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 56
3 Nov	36.1 °C	13 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 56
4 Nov	36.6 °C	20 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 55
5 Nov	37.9 °C	15 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 68
6 Nov after	38.9 °C	15 %	50 km/h	0.7 mm	Extreme 57
7 Nov after	35.5 °C	14 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
8 Nov after	38.6 °C	12 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 55
9 Nov after	39.2 °C	14 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 64
10 Nov after	37.4 °C	12 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 60
11 Nov after	37.1 °C	15 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 64
12 Nov after	34.6 °C	20 %	50 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 62
13 Nov after	35.5 °C	16 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 58
14 Nov after	35.4 °C	17 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 60
15 Nov after	36.1 °C	18 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 60

Before and after, from space

Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.

↔

Before · 22 Oct 2023

After · 12 Nov 2023

Before After

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 5 November 2023 the air beside the fire reached 56 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 24: 1.6 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak56 µg/m³

Days over the guideline4 days

PM1081 µg/m³

Optical depth1.06

WHO 15

272829303112345678

Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

Particles from the Copernicus CAMS model at the centre of the perimeter; these are not measurements in each town. The pale bar is the worst hour, the solid one the daily average.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)

Detections table · 713Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.

⬇ Download CSV Times in UTC. Each detection is a 375 m pixel: a large fire yields hundreds per pass.

Date and time	Satellite	FRP (MW)	Lat	Lon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Australia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Ashburton fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 29 October 2023 and 5 November 2023: 8 days between the first and last heat detection of the perimeter.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 21,867 hectares (218.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Ashburton (21,932 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 38.6 °C, humidity dropped to 11 % and gusts hit 50 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 72, class Very extreme.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Australia (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

Where to verify it

A satellite detection is not an official report. Final figures and the fire’s status are published by each country’s emergency service.

Emergency number: 000 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

Satellite cross-check

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

History of this page Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

No changes since 24 October 2026.

RSS Changes to this page

Does something look wrong on this page?

This page is built from satellite data and official records, and it sometimes gets things wrong: the wrong dates, the wrong town, two fires merged into one, or something that was not a wildfire at all. If you know this fire first-hand (you live nearby, saw it, fought it or reported on it), tell us what really happened and we will check it.

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What really happened?

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We will only use your email to reply about this report. Privacy. This is not an emergency service: if there is a fire now, call 000.

How we know this

Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 713 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
We have not matched this page with any official record.
Weather: Copernicus ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, in cells of about 25 km.
Built-up area and population come from the JRC Global Human Settlement Layer (epoch 2025, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.

How we build fire pages: methodology ›

Where this data comes from

The perimeter comes from the Copernicus Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), which rebuilds it from MODIS and VIIRS heat detections and publishes it under CC BY 4.0. It is not measured on imagery as in Europe, so it is an estimate. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. Municipal boundaries come from geoBoundaries ADM2 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ from each country’s official figure.

Where it burned