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Manjimup fire, March 2022 Manjimup, Nannup

Out · last detection 18 Mar 2022, 06:08 UTC

The fire started on 11 March 2022 in Manjimup, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 8 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 12,782 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 723th largest in Western Australia since 2016 (of 2718 with a page). Number 137 in Australia in 2022, of 566.

Compare with…
Burnt area
12,782ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
8days
11 Mar 2022 – 18 Mar 2022
Municipalities hit
2
local government areas
Started on
11 Mar
2022
Heat detections
821
in a single hotspot: 491 MW
Danger at start
22
High · FWI index
Average daily power
2.4GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 11 Mar18 Mar
18 Mar 2022

How it evolved, day by day

11 Mar 2022 · 182 MW · 12 12 Mar 2022 · 2,998 MW · 197 13 Mar 2022 · 6,315 MW · 272 14 Mar 2022 · 6,211 MW · 226 15 Mar 2022 · 387 MW · 72 17 Mar 2022 · 795 MW · 37 18 Mar 2022 · 28 MW · 5
11 Mar 12 Mar 13 Mar 14 Mar 15 Mar 17 Mar 18 Mar

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

The weather it burned in

31°high
56km/h · peak gust
26%lowest humidity

It had gone 8 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 14.1 mm on 26 Mar.

This area had burned before

7% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 80 ha in 2018, 912 ha in 2021.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 8.1% of the area of London (128 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. Manjimup where it started
    8,767 ha reached on 11 Mar
    1.2 %
  2. 4,050 ha reached on 13 Mar
    1.3 %

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 area0.53 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.53 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)
11 Mar 31.1 °C 34 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
12 Mar 25.1 °C 50 % 33 km/h 0.4 mm Moderate 18
13 Mar 24.4 °C 60 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 15
14 Mar 25.1 °C 62 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 13
15 Mar 22.8 °C 68 % 44 km/h 0.7 mm Low 11
16 Mar 22.1 °C 74 % 55 km/h 2.3 mm Low 6
17 Mar 26.4 °C 56 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Low 7
18 Mar 23.1 °C 77 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Low 8
19 Mar after 21.0 °C 63 % 56 km/h 0.4 mm Moderate 14
20 Mar after 19.5 °C 71 % 48 km/h 2.2 mm Very low 5
21 Mar after 21.0 °C 59 % 45 km/h 0.1 mm Low 8
22 Mar after 18.9 °C 55 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Low 11
23 Mar after 20.9 °C 50 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 13
24 Mar after 24.4 °C 40 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 17
25 Mar after 28.9 °C 26 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
26 Mar after 22.2 °C 55 % 48 km/h 14.1 mm Very low 2

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 4 Mar 2022
After · 25 Mar 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 · 821Every 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 Manjimup fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 11 March 2022 and 18 March 2022: 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 12,782 hectares (127.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Manjimup (8,767 ha, 1.2 %); Nannup (4,050 ha, 1.3 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 31.1 °C, humidity dropped to 26 % and gusts hit 56 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 24, class High.
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. 821 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.