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Dundas fire, 1 December 2023 Dundas

Out · last detection 9 Dec 2023, 16:56 UTC

The fire started on 1 December 2023 in Dundas, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 10,166 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1006th largest in Western Australia since 2016 (of 2718 with a page). Number 551 in Australia in 2023, of 1235.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Dundas · 2023Dundas · 2019Dundas · 2019Esperance · 2021

Burnt area
10,166ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
9days
1 Dec 2023 – 9 Dec 2023
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
1 Dec
2023
Heat detections
705
in a single hotspot: 249 MW
Danger at start
24
High · FWI index
Average daily power
1.2GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Dec9 Dec
9 Dec 2023

How it evolved, day by day

1 Dec 2023 · 3 MW · 3 2 Dec 2023 · 1,087 MW · 59 3 Dec 2023 · 2,305 MW · 163 4 Dec 2023 · 2,888 MW · 175 5 Dec 2023 · 2,375 MW · 72 6 Dec 2023 · 594 MW · 45 7 Dec 2023 · 13 MW · 15 9 Dec 2023 · 19 MW · 6
1 Dec 3 Dec 4 Dec 5 Dec 7 Dec

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

The weather it burned in

36°high
52km/h · peak gust
14%lowest humidity

It had gone one day without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

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 6.4% of the area of London (102 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
    10,217 ha reached on 1 Dec
    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 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)
1 Dec 27.9 °C 35 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
2 Dec 35.8 °C 20 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
3 Dec 35.2 °C 19 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
4 Dec 35.4 °C 20 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
5 Dec 31.0 °C 32 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
6 Dec 29.3 °C 34 % 37 km/h 0.6 mm High 25
7 Dec 36.3 °C 26 % 40 km/h 3.6 mm Moderate 21
8 Dec 24.1 °C 38 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
9 Dec 21.9 °C 27 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
10 Dec after 22.3 °C 31 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
11 Dec after 22.0 °C 47 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
12 Dec after 26.6 °C 38 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
13 Dec after 32.2 °C 14 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
14 Dec after 30.7 °C 27 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
15 Dec after 29.0 °C 32 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
16 Dec after 31.0 °C 22 % 48 km/h 0.1 mm High 37
17 Dec after 29.7 °C 32 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
18 Dec after 27.1 °C 28 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
19 Dec after 25.4 °C 29 % 43 km/h 0.1 mm High 35
20 Dec after 26.5 °C 27 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
21 Dec after 27.2 °C 26 % 48 km/h 0.2 mm High 37
22 Dec after 29.6 °C 29 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
23 Dec after 28.8 °C 32 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
24 Dec after 26.1 °C 31 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
25 Dec after 30.2 °C 24 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm High 36

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 24 Nov 2023
After · 16 Dec 2023

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 6 December 2023 the air beside the fire reached 19 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak19 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1028 µg/m³
Optical depth0.38
2930123456789101112
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 · 705Every 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 1 December 2023 and 9 December 2023: 9 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 10,166 hectares (101.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Dundas (10,217 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 36.3 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 52 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 45, class Very 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.

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
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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.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 705 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.