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Mid-Coast fire, 7 November 2019 Mid-Coast

Out · last detection 19 Nov 2019, 14:42 UTC

The fire started on 7 November 2019 in Mid-Coast, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 27,133 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 29th largest in New South Wales since 2016 (of 130 with a page). Number 112 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…
Burnt area
27,133ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
12days
7 Nov 2019 – 18 Nov 2019
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
7 Nov
2019
Heat detections
1,870
in a single hotspot: 456 MW
Danger at start
28
High · FWI index
Average daily power
2.4GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 7 Nov18 Nov
19 Nov 2019

How it evolved, day by day

7 Nov 2019 · 1,010 MW · 110 8 Nov 2019 · 11,875 MW · 230 9 Nov 2019 · 5,166 MW · 336 10 Nov 2019 · 1,919 MW · 166 11 Nov 2019 · 427 MW · 119 12 Nov 2019 · 3,006 MW · 145 13 Nov 2019 · 2,741 MW · 280 14 Nov 2019 · 2,420 MW · 180 15 Nov 2019 · 2,676 MW · 235 16 Nov 2019 · 164 MW · 41 17 Nov 2019 · 138 MW · 18 18 Nov 2019 · 74 MW · 8 19 Nov 2019 · 3 MW · 2
7 Nov 8 Nov 9 Nov 11 Nov 13 Nov 15 Nov 17 Nov 19 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

32°high
58km/h · peak gust
14%lowest humidity

It had gone one day without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 4.9 mm on 24 Nov.

This area had burned before

2% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 556 ha in 2018.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 17% of the area of London (271 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. Mid-Coast where it started
    27,193 ha reached on 7 Nov
    2.7 %

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 area92 ha
Residents≈ 2,000

Inside the perimeter there were about 92 hectares of built-up land and about 2,000 residents (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)
7 Nov 32.5 °C 14 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
8 Nov 30.2 °C 16 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
9 Nov 21.0 °C 23 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
10 Nov 23.7 °C 30 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
11 Nov 24.3 °C 43 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
12 Nov 32.1 °C 19 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
13 Nov 24.1 °C 27 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
14 Nov 24.3 °C 24 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
15 Nov 29.4 °C 24 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
16 Nov 24.1 °C 51 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
17 Nov 25.4 °C 44 % 58 km/h 0.3 mm High 22
18 Nov 25.3 °C 43 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
19 Nov after 30.2 °C 18 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
20 Nov after 24.7 °C 43 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
21 Nov after 29.2 °C 51 % 57 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
22 Nov after 32.3 °C 35 % 41 km/h 0.9 mm High 23
23 Nov after 25.6 °C 65 % 31 km/h 0.7 mm Low 11
24 Nov after 22.3 °C 80 % 27 km/h 4.9 mm Very low 0

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 31 Oct 2019
After · 25 Nov 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 · 1,870Every 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 Mid-Coast fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 7 November 2019 and 18 November 2019: 12 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 27,133 hectares (271.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Mid-Coast (27,193 ha, 2.7 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 32.5 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 58 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 37, 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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 1,870 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.