How long did the Snowy Valleys fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 28 December 2019 and 19 January 2020: 23 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 177,828 hectares (1,778.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire entered 4 municipalities: Snowy Valleys (164,513 ha, 18 %); Wagga Wagga (10,759 ha, 2.2 %); Cootamundra-Gundagai (2,386 ha, 0.6 %); Snowy Monaro (1 ha, 0.0 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 35.7 °C, humidity dropped to 10 % and gusts hit 72 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 40, class Very 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.

AU · Australia · 2019-12-28 → 2020-01-19

Snowy Valleys fire, December 2019 Snowy Valleys, Wagga Wagga, Cootamundra-Gundagai

Out · last detection 19 Jan 2020, 04:19 UTC

The fire started on 28 December 2019 in Snowy Valleys, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 23 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 177,828 hectares from heat detections, spread across 4 municipalities.

This page is probably a fire complex, not a single fire. GWIS merges into one perimeter the fires that touch over weeks, which in large burning seasons can join dozens of separate fires. The total area is reliable; the origin and dates refer to the whole complex.

Other fire pages in the same area and on the same dates:

It is the 7th largest in New South Wales since 2016 (of 130 with a page). Number 11 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Snowy Valleys · 2019

Burnt area: 177,828ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 23days; 28 Dec 2019 – 19 Jan 2020
Municipalities hit: 4; local government areas
Started on: 28 Dec; 2019
Heat detections: 16,177; in a single hotspot: 1,100 MW
Danger at start: 25; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 16.8GW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 28 Dec19 Jan

Play back 19 Jan 2020

How it evolved, day by day

28 Dec 1 Jan 4 Jan 5 Jan 10 Jan 14 Jan 18 Jan

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

72km/h · peak gust

10%lowest humidity

It had gone 25 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 27.9 mm on 20 Jan.

This area had burned before

4% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,014 ha in 2016, 2,528 ha in 2017, 3,849 ha in 2018, 428 ha in 2019. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 7,705 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 1.1 times the area of London (1,778 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

Snowy Valleys where it started

164,513 ha reached on 28 Dec

18 %
Wagga Wagga

10,759 ha reached on 29 Dec

2.2 %
Cootamundra-Gundagai

2,386 ha reached on 29 Dec

0.6 %
Snowy Monaro

1 ha reached on 5 Jan

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 area30 ha

Residents≈ 300

Inside the perimeter there were about 30 hectares of built-up land and about 300 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)
28 Dec	30.5 °C	20 %	57 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
29 Dec	27.1 °C	29 %	40 km/h	0.3 mm	Moderate 20
30 Dec	31.9 °C	10 %	62 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
31 Dec	28.1 °C	17 %	72 km/h	2.4 mm	Moderate 16
1 Jan	26.7 °C	14 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	High 21
2 Jan	29.2 °C	15 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	High 23
3 Jan	30.1 °C	14 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
4 Jan	35.7 °C	11 %	68 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
5 Jan	26.6 °C	36 %	58 km/h	0.6 mm	High 23
6 Jan	20.2 °C	48 %	44 km/h	2.7 mm	Very low 4
7 Jan	25.0 °C	43 %	53 km/h	0.6 mm	Low 10
8 Jan	27.8 °C	25 %	50 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
9 Jan	26.5 °C	33 %	44 km/h	0.1 mm	Moderate 20
10 Jan	30.3 °C	25 %	59 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
11 Jan	22.6 °C	25 %	63 km/h	0.0 mm	High 22
12 Jan	21.4 °C	37 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
13 Jan	23.6 °C	30 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 21
14 Jan	27.0 °C	25 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
15 Jan	22.3 °C	43 %	36 km/h	2.1 mm	Low 5
16 Jan	23.2 °C	49 %	44 km/h	5.3 mm	Very low 2
17 Jan	21.9 °C	42 %	40 km/h	2.1 mm	Very low 3
18 Jan	22.3 °C	44 %	41 km/h	2.5 mm	Very low 3
19 Jan	23.4 °C	42 %	35 km/h	10.3 mm	Very low 1
20 Jan after	15.2 °C	75 %	53 km/h	27.9 mm	Very low 0

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 21 Dec 2019

After · 26 Jan 2020

Before After

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 · 16,177Every 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 time	Satellite	FRP (MW)	Lat	Lon

Other fires nearby

8,480 haSnowy ValleysJanuary 2019 · 10 days · 37 km away

All fires in Australia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Snowy Valleys fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 28 December 2019 and 19 January 2020: 23 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 177,828 hectares (1,778.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire entered 4 municipalities: Snowy Valleys (164,513 ha, 18 %); Wagga Wagga (10,759 ha, 2.2 %); Cootamundra-Gundagai (2,386 ha, 0.6 %); Snowy Monaro (1 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 35.7 °C, humidity dropped to 10 % and gusts hit 72 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 40, class Very 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

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

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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What really happened?

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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; 3 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 16,177 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.

Where it burned