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East Arnhem fire, June 2016 East Arnhem, West Arnhem

Out · last detection 12 Jul 2016, 04:40 UTC

The fire started on 29 June 2016 in East Arnhem, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 13 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 16,949 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 773th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3503 with a page). Number 78 in Australia in 2016, of 427.

Compare with…

Suggestions: East Arnhem · 2026West Arnhem · 2025West Arnhem · 2023West Arnhem · 2026

Burnt area
16,949ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
13days
29 Jun 2016 – 11 Jul 2016
Municipalities hit
2
local government areas
Started on
29 Jun
2016
Heat detections
992
in a single hotspot: 98 MW
Danger at start
32
High · FWI index
Average daily power
583MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 29 Jun11 Jul
12 Jul 2016

How it evolved, day by day

29 Jun 2016 · 19 MW · 6 30 Jun 2016 · 422 MW · 40 1 Jul 2016 · 533 MW · 48 2 Jul 2016 · 352 MW · 50 3 Jul 2016 · 114 MW · 11 4 Jul 2016 · 64 MW · 14 5 Jul 2016 · 422 MW · 76 6 Jul 2016 · 212 MW · 34 7 Jul 2016 · 5,129 MW · 552 8 Jul 2016 · 654 MW · 80 9 Jul 2016 · 32 MW · 12 10 Jul 2016 · 179 MW · 24 11 Jul 2016 · 10 MW · 1 12 Jul 2016 · 14 MW · 3
29 Jun 1 Jul 3 Jul 5 Jul 7 Jul 9 Jul 11 Jul

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

The weather it burned in

33°high
60km/h · peak gust
27%lowest humidity

It had gone 34 days 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 11% of the area of London (169 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. East Arnhem where it started
    10,460 ha reached on 25 Jun
    0.3 %
  2. West Arnhem
    6,582 ha reached on 27 Jun
    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 2015
Built-up area0.36 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.36 hectares of built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2015, 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)
25 Jun 33.3 °C 42 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
26 Jun 32.8 °C 39 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
27 Jun 33.4 °C 36 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
28 Jun 31.6 °C 41 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
29 Jun 30.5 °C 43 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
30 Jun 31.2 °C 43 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
1 Jul 31.4 °C 35 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
2 Jul 31.7 °C 31 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
3 Jul 30.6 °C 38 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
4 Jul 31.9 °C 38 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
5 Jul 32.3 °C 32 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
6 Jul 32.0 °C 35 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
7 Jul 31.1 °C 34 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
8 Jul 32.1 °C 27 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
9 Jul 32.3 °C 34 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
10 Jul 32.3 °C 36 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
11 Jul 30.7 °C 53 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
12 Jul after 31.0 °C 54 % 32 km/h 4.7 mm Low 7
13 Jul after 30.7 °C 39 % 54 km/h 0.6 mm High 27
14 Jul after 26.4 °C 48 % 60 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
15 Jul after 26.5 °C 43 % 57 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
16 Jul after 27.5 °C 34 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
17 Jul after 28.3 °C 31 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
18 Jul after 28.6 °C 28 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
19 Jul after 29.8 °C 31 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
20 Jul after 31.9 °C 33 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
21 Jul after 32.0 °C 39 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
22 Jul after 33.3 °C 36 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
23 Jul after 34.1 °C 34 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
24 Jul after 32.9 °C 35 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
25 Jul after 31.9 °C 34 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
26 Jul after 32.7 °C 31 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
27 Jul after 32.0 °C 31 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
28 Jul after 31.7 °C 32 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 22 Jun 2016
After · 18 Jul 2016

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 · 992Every 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 East Arnhem fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 29 June 2016 and 11 July 2016: 13 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 16,949 hectares (169.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: East Arnhem (10,460 ha, 0.3 %); West Arnhem (6,582 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 33.4 °C, humidity dropped to 27 % and gusts hit 60 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 39, 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. 992 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 2015, 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.