Busselton fire, April 2022 Busselton, Nannup, Augusta Margaret River
The fire started on 13 April 2022 in Busselton, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 10,840 hectares from heat detections, spread across 4 municipalities.
It is the 922th largest in Western Australia since 2016 (of 2728 with a page). Number 174 in Australia in 2022, of 566.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 10,840ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 12days
- 13 Apr 2022 – 24 Apr 2022
- Municipalities hit
- 4
- local government areas
- Started on
- 13 Apr
- 2022
- Heat detections
- 1,377
- in a single hotspot: 82 MW
- Danger at start
- 13
- Moderate · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 497MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
It had gone 2 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 5.4 mm on 25 Apr.
This area had burned before
29% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,678 ha in 2017, 534 ha in 2018, 208 ha in 2019, 657 ha in 2020, 114 ha in 2021.
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
Busselton where it started5,377 ha reached on 13 Apr3.7 %
-
3,359 ha reached on 14 Apr1.1 %
-
1,662 ha reached on 20 Apr0.8 %
-
459 ha reached on 13 Apr0.3 %
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 2020Inside the perimeter there were about 1.4 hectares of built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2020, 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.
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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 13 Apr | 22.4 °C | 47 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 13 |
| 14 Apr | 23.5 °C | 37 % | 26 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 15 |
| 15 Apr | 24.6 °C | 42 % | 23 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 16 |
| 16 Apr | 22.9 °C | 47 % | 44 km/h | 0.1 mm | Moderate 19 |
| 17 Apr | 18.1 °C | 46 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 16 |
| 18 Apr | 19.5 °C | 57 % | 23 km/h | 0.1 mm | Moderate 13 |
| 19 Apr | 21.0 °C | 57 % | 26 km/h | 0.5 mm | Moderate 13 |
| 20 Apr | 21.0 °C | 48 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 15 |
| 21 Apr | 21.5 °C | 42 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 18 |
| 22 Apr | 22.2 °C | 36 % | 42 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 21 |
| 23 Apr | 23.2 °C | 34 % | 39 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 22 |
| 24 Apr | 25.3 °C | 32 % | 33 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 24 |
| 25 Apr after | 23.4 °C | 38 % | 39 km/h | 5.4 mm | Low 5 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.
Detections table · 1,377Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 6,412 haAugusta Margaret River20 October 2017 · 5 days · 13 km away
- 7,918 haNannupNovember 2016 · 10 days · 24 km away
- 6,520 haNannupJanuary 2024 · 4 days · 29 km away
- 9,748 haNannupNovember 2022 · 5 days · 33 km away
- 8,037 haNannupNovember 2021 · 5 days · 36 km away
- 7,575 haNannupMay 2026 · 6 days · 40 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Busselton fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 13 April 2022 and 24 April 2022: 12 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 10,840 hectares (108.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 4 municipalities: Busselton (5,377 ha, 3.7 %); Nannup (3,359 ha, 1.1 %); Augusta Margaret River (1,662 ha, 0.8 %); Donnybrook-Balingup (459 ha, 0.3 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 25.3 °C, humidity dropped to 32 % and gusts hit 44 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 24, class High.
- 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
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.
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.
Report an error
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. 1,377 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 2020, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.
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.