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MacDonnell fire, 22 December 2019 MacDonnell

Out · last detection 30 Dec 2019, 16:53 UTC

The fire started on 22 December 2019 in MacDonnell, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 8 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 24,935 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 460th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3496 with a page). Number 128 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

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Burnt area
24,935ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
8days
22 Dec 2019 – 29 Dec 2019
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
22 Dec
2019
Heat detections
1,241
in a single hotspot: 167 MW
Danger at start
92
Very extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
1.1GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 22 Dec29 Dec
30 Dec 2019

How it evolved, day by day

22 Dec 2019 · 610 MW · 53 23 Dec 2019 · 268 MW · 27 24 Dec 2019 · 5,987 MW · 880 25 Dec 2019 · 1,779 MW · 87 26 Dec 2019 · 603 MW · 111 27 Dec 2019 · 277 MW · 40 28 Dec 2019 · 149 MW · 4 29 Dec 2019 · 215 MW · 11 30 Dec 2019 · 5 MW · 3
22 Dec 24 Dec 26 Dec 28 Dec 30 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

44°high
58km/h · peak gust
5%lowest humidity

It had gone 22 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.6 mm on 3 Jan.

This area had burned before

1% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 136 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 16% of the area of London (249 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. MacDonnell where it started
    25,328 ha reached on 21 Dec
    0.1 %

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)
21 Dec 39.8 °C 12 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 92
22 Dec 41.7 °C 9 % 57 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 87
23 Dec 42.4 °C 7 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 90
24 Dec 44.4 °C 5 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 95
25 Dec 43.9 °C 8 % 56 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 98
26 Dec 41.3 °C 11 % 58 km/h 0.2 mm Very extreme 95
27 Dec 41.2 °C 9 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 82
28 Dec 41.7 °C 11 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 74
29 Dec 41.0 °C 14 % 46 km/h 0.5 mm Very extreme 76
30 Dec after 40.8 °C 15 % 46 km/h 0.2 mm Very extreme 85
31 Dec after 36.8 °C 18 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 74
1 Jan after 38.0 °C 14 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 66
2 Jan after 39.5 °C 17 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
3 Jan after 37.4 °C 24 % 55 km/h 2.6 mm High 33

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 15 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 · 1,241Every 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 MacDonnell fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 22 December 2019 and 29 December 2019: 8 days between the first and last heat detection of the perimeter.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 24,935 hectares (249.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered MacDonnell (25,328 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 44.4 °C, humidity dropped to 5 % and gusts hit 58 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 98, 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 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.

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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 1,241 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.