How long did the Laverton fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 2 November 2019 to 18 November 2019 (17 days). The perimeter dates it from 2 November 2019 to 15 November 2019.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 44,279 hectares (442.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire entered 2 municipalities: Laverton (41,668 ha, 0.2 %); Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yunkunytjatjara (2,523 ha, 0.0 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 40.6 °C, humidity dropped to 4 % and gusts hit 65 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 96, 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.

AU · Australia · 2019-11-02 → 2019-11-18

Laverton fire, 2 November 2019 Laverton, Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yunkunytjatjara

Out · last detection 18 Nov 2019, 16:41 UTC

The fire started on 2 November 2019 in Laverton, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 17 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 44,279 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 99th largest in Western Australia since 2016 (of 2728 with a page). Number 64 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Laverton · 2018 Laverton · 2019 Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yunkunytjatjara · 2019 Laverton · 2018

Burnt area: 44,279ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 17days; 2 Nov 2019 – 18 Nov 2019
Municipalities hit: 2; local government areas
Started on: 2 Nov; 2019
Heat detections: 1,744; in a single hotspot: 290 MW
Danger at start: 66; Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power: 2.0GW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 2 Nov18 Nov

Play back 18 Nov 2019

How it evolved, day by day

2 Nov 5 Nov 8 Nov 11 Nov 14 Nov 17 Nov

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

The weather it burned in

41°high

65km/h · peak gust

4%lowest humidity

It had gone 42 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

0% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 158 ha in 2018.

133 ha Laverton fire, October 2018 5,299 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 28% of the area of London (443 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

Laverton where it started

41,668 ha reached on 2 Nov

0.2 %
Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yunkunytjatjara

2,523 ha reached on 10 Nov

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 Nov	29.7 °C	8 %	55 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 66
3 Nov	27.6 °C	11 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
4 Nov	29.4 °C	11 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
5 Nov	33.0 °C	7 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 56
6 Nov	34.3 °C	10 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 58
7 Nov	33.6 °C	11 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 58
8 Nov	30.3 °C	15 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
9 Nov	30.8 °C	10 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
10 Nov	36.4 °C	5 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 58
11 Nov	40.6 °C	5 %	65 km/h	0.0 mm	Very extreme 96
12 Nov	26.7 °C	19 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 58
13 Nov	30.3 °C	9 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 59
14 Nov	34.7 °C	6 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 56
15 Nov	36.2 °C	6 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 61
16 Nov	38.0 °C	8 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 69
17 Nov	38.3 °C	8 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 66
18 Nov	40.5 °C	4 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 66
19 Nov after	41.9 °C	5 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 66
20 Nov after	42.7 °C	4 %	62 km/h	0.0 mm	Very extreme 90
21 Nov after	30.9 °C	13 %	62 km/h	0.0 mm	Very extreme 87
22 Nov after	34.7 °C	9 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 64
23 Nov after	33.1 °C	11 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 67
24 Nov after	39.2 °C	7 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 62
25 Nov after	36.6 °C	13 %	48 km/h	0.3 mm	Very extreme 73
26 Nov after	31.5 °C	18 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 61
27 Nov after	34.7 °C	18 %	42 km/h	0.4 mm	Extreme 56
28 Nov after	32.7 °C	25 %	29 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 46

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 26 Oct 2019

After · 25 Nov 2019

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 · 1,744Every 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 Laverton fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 2 November 2019 to 18 November 2019 (17 days). The perimeter dates it from 2 November 2019 to 15 November 2019.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 44,279 hectares (442.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire entered 2 municipalities: Laverton (41,668 ha, 0.2 %); Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yunkunytjatjara (2,523 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 40.6 °C, humidity dropped to 4 % and gusts hit 65 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 96, 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

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

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.

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What do you think is wrong?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

What really happened?

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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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 2 November 2019 to 15 November 2019. 1,744 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