How long did the East Arnhem fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 19 August 2018 to 10 September 2018 (23 days). The perimeter dates it from 19 August 2018 to 8 September 2018.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 5,707 hectares (57.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered East Arnhem (5,737 ha, 0.2 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 32.3 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 61 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.

AU · Australia · 2018-08-19 → 2018-09-10

East Arnhem fire, 19 August 2018 East Arnhem

Out · last detection 10 Sept 2018, 04:27 UTC

The fire started on 19 August 2018 in East Arnhem, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 23 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,707 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 2960th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3508 with a page). Number 790 in Australia in 2018, of 924.

Compare with…

Suggestions: East Arnhem · 2017 East Arnhem · 2026 East Arnhem · 2021 East Arnhem · 2019

Burnt area: 5,707ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 23days; 19 Aug 2018 – 10 Sept 2018
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 19 Aug; 2018
Heat detections: 314; in a single hotspot: 35 MW
Danger at start: 27; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 92MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 19 Aug10 Sept

Play back 10 Sept 2018

How it evolved, day by day

19 Aug 23 Aug 27 Aug 1 Sept 2 Sept 5 Sept 9 Sept

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

The weather it burned in

32°high

61km/h · peak gust

20%lowest humidity

It had gone 7 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.5 mm on 12 Sept.

This area had burned before

19% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,153 ha in 2017. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,087 ha that had burned before.

467 ha East Arnhem fire, October 2017 6,143 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 3.6% of the area of London (57 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

East Arnhem where it started

5,737 ha reached on 19 Aug

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 2020

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable 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)
19 Aug	29.4 °C	46 %	50 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
20 Aug	27.2 °C	45 %	61 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
21 Aug	27.7 °C	44 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
22 Aug	28.3 °C	45 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
23 Aug	30.4 °C	32 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
24 Aug	31.2 °C	33 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
25 Aug	30.9 °C	34 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
26 Aug	29.5 °C	49 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
27 Aug	30.1 °C	26 %	54 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 41
28 Aug	30.3 °C	22 %	50 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
29 Aug	30.2 °C	35 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
30 Aug	30.9 °C	41 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
31 Aug	31.3 °C	39 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	High 29
1 Sept	30.6 °C	38 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
2 Sept	32.3 °C	36 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
3 Sept	31.4 °C	36 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
4 Sept	31.1 °C	30 %	59 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 42
5 Sept	30.8 °C	32 %	50 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
6 Sept	31.6 °C	20 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
7 Sept	31.0 °C	41 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
8 Sept	31.9 °C	35 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
9 Sept	30.1 °C	47 %	49 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
10 Sept	31.0 °C	24 %	51 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 44
11 Sept after	31.1 °C	29 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
12 Sept after	29.5 °C	42 %	41 km/h	1.5 mm	Moderate 20

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 12 Aug 2018

After · 17 Sept 2018

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.

Detections table · 314Every 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 East Arnhem fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 19 August 2018 to 10 September 2018 (23 days). The perimeter dates it from 19 August 2018 to 8 September 2018.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 5,707 hectares (57.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered East Arnhem (5,737 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 32.3 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 61 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

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

26 October 2026 Last day with fire: 8 September 2018 → 10 September 2018.

RSS Changes to this page

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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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How we know this

Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 19 August 2018 to 8 September 2018. 314 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.

Where it burned