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Gwydir fire, 11 December 2019 Gwydir

Out · last detection 29 Dec 2019, 15:31 UTC

The fire started on 11 December 2019 in Gwydir, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 19 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 7,377 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 81th largest in New South Wales since 2016 (of 130 with a page). Number 526 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Narrabri · 2019

Burnt area
7,377ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
19days
11 Dec 2019 – 29 Dec 2019
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
11 Dec
2019
Heat detections
882
in a single hotspot: 318 MW
Danger at start
52
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
683MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 11 Dec29 Dec
29 Dec 2019

How it evolved, day by day

11 Dec 2019 · 5 MW · 2 12 Dec 2019 · 60 MW · 4 13 Dec 2019 · 58 MW · 15 14 Dec 2019 · 1,245 MW · 57 15 Dec 2019 · 336 MW · 72 16 Dec 2019 · 5,368 MW · 204 17 Dec 2019 · 1,159 MW · 172 18 Dec 2019 · 732 MW · 105 19 Dec 2019 · 507 MW · 65 20 Dec 2019 · 639 MW · 97 21 Dec 2019 · 476 MW · 39 22 Dec 2019 · 327 MW · 41 25 Dec 2019 · 2 MW · 2 26 Dec 2019 · 6 MW · 3 28 Dec 2019 · 5 MW · 3 29 Dec 2019 · 3 MW · 1
11 Dec 14 Dec 16 Dec 17 Dec 20 Dec 25 Dec 29 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

40°high
48km/h · peak gust
8%lowest humidity

It had gone 10 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.6 mm on 8 Jan.

This area had burned before

3% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 191 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 4.7% of the area of London (74 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. Gwydir where it started
    7,447 ha reached on 11 Dec
    0.8 %

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)
11 Dec 37.0 °C 13 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
12 Dec 35.3 °C 11 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
13 Dec 31.4 °C 20 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
14 Dec 33.2 °C 11 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
15 Dec 34.7 °C 9 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
16 Dec 36.6 °C 8 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
17 Dec 34.1 °C 17 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
18 Dec 33.2 °C 21 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
19 Dec 34.6 °C 17 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
20 Dec 38.1 °C 13 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
21 Dec 38.2 °C 14 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
22 Dec 39.6 °C 15 % 32 km/h 0.2 mm Very high 49
23 Dec 32.7 °C 34 % 31 km/h 0.4 mm High 36
24 Dec 33.3 °C 31 % 40 km/h 3.4 mm Moderate 17
25 Dec 31.9 °C 23 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
26 Dec 32.8 °C 16 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
27 Dec 32.4 °C 15 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
28 Dec 32.9 °C 15 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
29 Dec 35.3 °C 15 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
30 Dec after 34.9 °C 12 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
31 Dec after 34.5 °C 15 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
1 Jan after 36.4 °C 18 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
2 Jan after 38.4 °C 18 % 49 km/h 0.3 mm Extreme 51
3 Jan after 35.8 °C 20 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
4 Jan after 37.2 °C 17 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
5 Jan after 38.9 °C 14 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
6 Jan after 34.3 °C 19 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
7 Jan after 33.8 °C 25 % 39 km/h 0.6 mm Very high 40
8 Jan after 36.7 °C 20 % 36 km/h 1.6 mm High 33

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 4 Dec 2019
After · 5 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 · 882Every 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 Gwydir fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 11 December 2019 to 29 December 2019 (19 days). The perimeter dates it from 11 December 2019 to 22 December 2019.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 7,377 hectares (73.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Gwydir (7,447 ha, 0.8 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 39.6 °C, humidity dropped to 8 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 58, class 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 22 December 2019 → 29 December 2019.

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.
  • Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 11 December 2019 to 22 December 2019. 882 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.