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Narrabri fire, October 2019 Narrabri, Tamworth, Gwydir

Out · last detection 2 Nov 2019, 15:01 UTC

The fire started on 17 October 2019 in Narrabri, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 17 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 24,949 hectares from heat detections, spread across 3 municipalities.

It is the 33th largest in New South Wales since 2016 (of 130 with a page). Number 127 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Gwydir · 2019Narrabri · 2023

Burnt area
24,949ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
17days
17 Oct 2019 – 2 Nov 2019
Municipalities hit
3
local government areas
Started on
17 Oct
2019
Heat detections
3,788
in a single hotspot: 293 MW
Danger at start
26
High · FWI index
Average daily power
2.4GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 17 Oct2 Nov
2 Nov 2019

How it evolved, day by day

17 Oct 2019 · 151 MW · 17 18 Oct 2019 · 851 MW · 42 19 Oct 2019 · 18,908 MW · 786 20 Oct 2019 · 5,408 MW · 618 21 Oct 2019 · 1,910 MW · 274 22 Oct 2019 · 3,330 MW · 359 23 Oct 2019 · 508 MW · 152 24 Oct 2019 · 279 MW · 76 25 Oct 2019 · 1,100 MW · 230 26 Oct 2019 · 1,408 MW · 189 27 Oct 2019 · 3,003 MW · 347 28 Oct 2019 · 2,719 MW · 364 29 Oct 2019 · 25 MW · 5 30 Oct 2019 · 28 MW · 14 31 Oct 2019 · 125 MW · 58 1 Nov 2019 · 1,053 MW · 167 2 Nov 2019 · 166 MW · 90
17 Oct 19 Oct 20 Oct 23 Oct 26 Oct 29 Oct 1 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

26°high
81km/h · peak gust
9%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

5% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,239 ha in 2018.

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. Narrabri where it started
    11,268 ha reached on 17 Oct
    0.9 %
  2. Tamworth
    9,880 ha reached on 17 Oct
    1.0 %
  3. Gwydir
    3,843 ha reached on 19 Oct
    0.4 %

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 area0.77 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.77 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)
17 Oct 24.9 °C 19 % 68 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
18 Oct 21.5 °C 9 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
19 Oct 22.5 °C 10 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
20 Oct 19.4 °C 16 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
21 Oct 21.8 °C 16 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
22 Oct 23.3 °C 18 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
23 Oct 24.3 °C 22 % 28 km/h 0.8 mm Moderate 17
24 Oct 24.7 °C 23 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
25 Oct 25.8 °C 17 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
26 Oct 26.3 °C 17 % 81 km/h 1.1 mm High 34
27 Oct 22.7 °C 10 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
28 Oct 24.2 °C 11 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
29 Oct 24.0 °C 21 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
30 Oct 21.1 °C 32 % 31 km/h 1.1 mm Moderate 14
31 Oct 23.0 °C 31 % 32 km/h 5.8 mm Very low 3
1 Nov 24.5 °C 25 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 13
2 Nov 23.8 °C 28 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
3 Nov after 23.6 °C 39 % 51 km/h 10.7 mm Very low 2
4 Nov after 21.4 °C 29 % 41 km/h 4.8 mm Very low 2
5 Nov after 15.9 °C 24 % 59 km/h 1.2 mm Low 6
6 Nov after 22.2 °C 12 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 13
7 Nov after 26.4 °C 11 % 59 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
8 Nov after 24.8 °C 13 % 60 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
9 Nov after 16.9 °C 13 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
10 Nov after 20.9 °C 19 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
11 Nov after 23.8 °C 15 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
12 Nov after 28.7 °C 10 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
13 Nov after 21.8 °C 8 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
14 Nov after 22.7 °C 15 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
15 Nov after 25.7 °C 15 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
16 Nov after 26.7 °C 10 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
17 Nov after 24.9 °C 7 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
18 Nov after 25.4 °C 18 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
19 Nov after 29.5 °C 6 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 32

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 10 Oct 2019
After · 9 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 · 3,788Every 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 Narrabri fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 17 October 2019 and 2 November 2019: 17 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 24,949 hectares (249.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 3 municipalities: Narrabri (11,268 ha, 0.9 %); Tamworth (9,880 ha, 1.0 %); Gwydir (3,843 ha, 0.4 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 26.4 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 81 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 34, 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.

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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.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 3,788 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.