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Dundas fire, 20 December 2019 Dundas, Esperance

Out · last detection 8 Jan 2020, 06:08 UTC

The fire started on 20 December 2019 in Dundas, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 20 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 120,445 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

This page is probably a fire complex, not a single fire. GWIS merges into one perimeter the fires that touch over weeks, which in large burning seasons can join dozens of separate fires. The total area is reliable; the origin and dates refer to the whole complex.

Other fire pages in the same area and on the same dates:

It is the 14th largest in Western Australia since 2016 (of 2729 with a page). Number 20 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Dundas · 2019Dundas · 2023Dundas · 2019Dundas · 2023

Burnt area
120,445ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
20days
20 Dec 2019 – 8 Jan 2020
Municipalities hit
2
local government areas
Started on
20 Dec
2019
Heat detections
9,771
in a single hotspot: 774 MW
Danger at start
62
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
14.6GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 20 Dec8 Jan
8 Jan 2020

How it evolved, day by day

20 Dec 2019 · 919 MW · 79 21 Dec 2019 · 12,893 MW · 494 22 Dec 2019 · 39,917 MW · 536 23 Dec 2019 · 2,514 MW · 73 24 Dec 2019 · 68 MW · 10 25 Dec 2019 · 258 MW · 17 26 Dec 2019 · 2,857 MW · 30 28 Dec 2019 · 43 MW · 5 29 Dec 2019 · 4,007 MW · 63 30 Dec 2019 · 3,801 MW · 317 31 Dec 2019 · 1,190 MW · 157 1 Jan 2020 · 29,796 MW · 1287 2 Jan 2020 · 70,401 MW · 1974 3 Jan 2020 · 3,442 MW · 124 4 Jan 2020 · 1,358 MW · 125 5 Jan 2020 · 3,383 MW · 353 6 Jan 2020 · 15,780 MW · 1042 7 Jan 2020 · 50,301 MW · 2384 8 Jan 2020 · 34,634 MW · 701
20 Dec 23 Dec 26 Dec 30 Dec 2 Jan 5 Jan 8 Jan

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

The weather it burned in

43°high
67km/h · peak gust
7%lowest humidity

It had gone 49 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 4.9 mm on 9 Jan.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 76% of the area of London (1,204 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

  1. Dundas where it started
    115,215 ha reached on 20 Dec
    1.2 %
  2. Esperance
    5,841 ha reached on 7 Jan
    0.1 %

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 2020
Built-up area1.3 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 1.3 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)
20 Dec 32.6 °C 17 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
21 Dec 32.8 °C 25 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
22 Dec 37.3 °C 24 % 48 km/h 0.8 mm Very high 46
23 Dec 39.8 °C 21 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
24 Dec 34.4 °C 35 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
25 Dec 35.7 °C 31 % 40 km/h 1.1 mm High 35
26 Dec 37.0 °C 27 % 40 km/h 2.2 mm High 28
27 Dec 36.2 °C 32 % 50 km/h 0.3 mm High 37
28 Dec 35.8 °C 20 % 59 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
29 Dec 42.4 °C 7 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 72
30 Dec 29.1 °C 19 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
31 Dec 31.3 °C 19 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
1 Jan 37.9 °C 12 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
2 Jan 42.9 °C 11 % 67 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 76
3 Jan 25.1 °C 25 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
4 Jan 25.2 °C 19 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
5 Jan 29.2 °C 16 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
6 Jan 35.2 °C 10 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
7 Jan 38.3 °C 8 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 66
8 Jan 42.1 °C 17 % 55 km/h 0.3 mm Extreme 66
9 Jan after 23.9 °C 50 % 47 km/h 4.9 mm Low 8

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 13 Dec 2019
After · 15 Jan 2020

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 · 9,771Every 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 timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Australia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Dundas fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 20 December 2019 and 8 January 2020: 20 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 120,445 hectares (1,204.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Dundas (115,215 ha, 1.2 %); Esperance (5,841 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 42.9 °C, humidity dropped to 7 % and gusts hit 67 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 76, 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

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.

Report an error
What do you think is wrong?

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; 4 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 9,771 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.

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.