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MacDonnell fire, 4 April 2022 MacDonnell

Out · last detection 7 Apr 2022, 04:55 UTC

The fire started on 4 April 2022 in MacDonnell, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,324 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 2596th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3496 with a page). Number 397 in Australia in 2022, of 566.

Compare with…

Suggestions: MacDonnell · 2017MacDonnell · 2023

Burnt area
6,324ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
3days
4 Apr 2022 – 6 Apr 2022
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
4 Apr
2022
Heat detections
229
in a single hotspot: 70 MW
Danger at start
59
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
974MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 4 Apr6 Apr
7 Apr 2022

How it evolved, day by day

4 Apr 2022 · 2,271 MW · 104 5 Apr 2022 · 1,511 MW · 101 6 Apr 2022 · 100 MW · 22 7 Apr 2022 · 13 MW · 2
4 Apr 5 Apr 6 Apr 7 Apr

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

The weather it burned in

36°high
44km/h · peak gust
9%lowest humidity

It had gone 59 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

11% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 321 ha in 2017, 420 ha in 2021.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 4% of the area of London (63 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
    6,300 ha reached on 4 Apr
    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)
4 Apr 33.2 °C 11 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
5 Apr 35.1 °C 12 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
6 Apr 34.5 °C 10 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 66
7 Apr after 32.6 °C 17 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
8 Apr after 30.9 °C 14 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
9 Apr after 32.1 °C 11 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
10 Apr after 33.7 °C 9 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
11 Apr after 35.1 °C 14 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
12 Apr after 35.8 °C 16 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
13 Apr after 35.9 °C 18 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
14 Apr after 36.4 °C 14 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
15 Apr after 36.1 °C 15 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
16 Apr after 35.7 °C 15 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
17 Apr after 35.4 °C 11 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
18 Apr after 31.4 °C 17 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 64
19 Apr after 28.4 °C 23 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
20 Apr after 28.8 °C 21 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
21 Apr after 28.7 °C 17 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
22 Apr after 28.4 °C 14 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
23 Apr after 27.1 °C 22 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 28 Mar 2022
After · 13 Apr 2022

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 · 229Every 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 4 April 2022 and 6 April 2022: 3 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 6,324 hectares (63.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered MacDonnell (6,300 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 35.9 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 44 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 66, 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 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. 229 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.