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Laverton fire, 2 January 2019 Laverton

Out · last detection 11 Jan 2019, 17:13 UTC

The fire started on 2 January 2019 in Laverton, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 10 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,214 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 2584th largest in Western Australia since 2016 (of 2734 with a page). Number 764 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…
Burnt area
5,214ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
10days
2 Jan 2019 – 11 Jan 2019
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
2 Jan
2019
Heat detections
220
in a single hotspot: 202 MW
Danger at start
71
Very extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
501MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 2 Jan11 Jan
11 Jan 2019

How it evolved, day by day

2 Jan 2019 · 29 MW · 17 3 Jan 2019 · 290 MW · 9 4 Jan 2019 · 5 MW · 2 6 Jan 2019 · 0 MW · 1 7 Jan 2019 · 7 MW · 3 8 Jan 2019 · 228 MW · 17 9 Jan 2019 · 2,517 MW · 72 10 Jan 2019 · 1,250 MW · 68 11 Jan 2019 · 184 MW · 31
2 Jan 4 Jan 7 Jan 9 Jan 11 Jan

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

The weather it burned in

44°high
55km/h · peak gust
6%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 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 3.3% of the area of London (52 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. Laverton where it started
    5,192 ha reached on 2 Jan
    0.0 %

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)
2 Jan 43.6 °C 9 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 71
3 Jan 42.0 °C 6 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 74
4 Jan 33.7 °C 14 % 45 km/h 0.1 mm Very extreme 74
5 Jan 32.6 °C 12 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 78
6 Jan 32.0 °C 12 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
7 Jan 36.6 °C 9 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
8 Jan 39.3 °C 8 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 70
9 Jan 39.6 °C 8 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 85
10 Jan 42.1 °C 7 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 75
11 Jan 42.3 °C 8 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 92
12 Jan after 42.7 °C 9 % 59 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 94
13 Jan after 45.3 °C 8 % 60 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 96
14 Jan after 44.4 °C 9 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 82
15 Jan after 43.4 °C 10 % 38 km/h 0.1 mm Very extreme 81
16 Jan after 41.3 °C 14 % 40 km/h 0.3 mm Extreme 69
17 Jan after 41.3 °C 9 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 84
18 Jan after 36.5 °C 11 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 85
19 Jan after 34.5 °C 24 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
20 Jan after 37.9 °C 19 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
21 Jan after 41.3 °C 13 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 26 Dec 2018
After · 18 Jan 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 · 220Every 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

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Laverton fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 2 January 2019 to 11 January 2019 (10 days). The perimeter dates it from 7 January 2019 to 11 January 2019.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 5,214 hectares (52.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Laverton (5,192 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 43.6 °C, humidity dropped to 6 % and gusts hit 55 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 92, 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. Start date: 7 January 2019 → 2 January 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 7 January 2019 to 11 January 2019. 220 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.