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Kondinin fire, 3 December 2019 Kondinin

Out · last detection 12 Dec 2019, 06:15 UTC

The fire started on 3 December 2019 in Kondinin, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 10 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 33,083 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 155th largest in Western Australia since 2016 (of 2732 with a page). Number 91 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Kondinin · 2018Lake Grace · 2020Lake Grace · 2020Yilgarn · 2023

Burnt area
33,083ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
10days
3 Dec 2019 – 12 Dec 2019
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
3 Dec
2019
Heat detections
1,629
in a single hotspot: 510 MW
Danger at start
47
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
4.6GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 3 Dec12 Dec
12 Dec 2019

How it evolved, day by day

3 Dec 2019 · 5,372 MW · 412 4 Dec 2019 · 315 MW · 225 5 Dec 2019 · 3,859 MW · 265 6 Dec 2019 · 16,099 MW · 326 7 Dec 2019 · 12,702 MW · 329 8 Dec 2019 · 451 MW · 32 9 Dec 2019 · 2,167 MW · 38 11 Dec 2019 · 1 MW · 1 12 Dec 2019 · 7 MW · 1
3 Dec 5 Dec 6 Dec 7 Dec 9 Dec 12 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
68km/h · peak gust
9%lowest humidity

It had gone 13 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 21% of the area of London (331 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. Kondinin where it started
    33,188 ha reached on 3 Dec
    4.4 %

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 area0.31 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.31 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)
3 Dec 37.2 °C 14 % 34 km/h 0.3 mm Very high 47
4 Dec 38.8 °C 10 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 67
5 Dec 34.6 °C 19 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
6 Dec 39.8 °C 9 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
7 Dec 35.4 °C 14 % 68 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 80
8 Dec 26.1 °C 23 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
9 Dec 28.1 °C 16 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
10 Dec 31.0 °C 18 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
11 Dec 31.1 °C 15 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
12 Dec 32.6 °C 16 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
13 Dec after 36.0 °C 8 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
14 Dec after 39.7 °C 6 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 68
15 Dec after 41.3 °C 8 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 66
16 Dec after 39.6 °C 15 % 46 km/h 0.1 mm Extreme 69
17 Dec after 36.8 °C 21 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 66
18 Dec after 42.0 °C 9 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
19 Dec after 32.9 °C 16 % 66 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 75
20 Dec after 28.5 °C 24 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
21 Dec after 35.2 °C 21 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
22 Dec after 37.3 °C 19 % 46 km/h 0.6 mm Extreme 53

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 26 Nov 2019
After · 19 Dec 2019

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 · 1,629Every 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 Kondinin fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 3 December 2019 to 12 December 2019 (10 days). The perimeter dates it from 3 December 2019 to 11 December 2019.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 33,083 hectares (330.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Kondinin (33,188 ha, 4.4 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 39.8 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 68 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 80, 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 11 December 2019 → 12 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 3 December 2019 to 11 December 2019. 1,629 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.