How long did the Unincorporated NT fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 4 June 2016 to 22 June 2016 (19 days). The perimeter dates it from 9 June 2016 to 15 June 2016.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,256 hectares (62.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Unincorporated NT (6,133 ha, 0.3 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 36.2 °C, humidity dropped to 28 % and gusts hit 49 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 41, 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 · 2016-06-04 → 2016-06-22

Unincorporated NT fire, 4 June 2016 Unincorporated NT

Out · last detection 19 Jun 2016, 05:11 UTC

The fire started on 4 June 2016 in Unincorporated NT, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 19 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,256 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 2627th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3508 with a page). Number 310 in Australia in 2016, of 427.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Unincorporated NT · 2019 Victoria Daly · 2020 Unincorporated NT · 2016 Unincorporated NT · 2022

Burnt area: 6,256ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 19days; 4 Jun 2016 – 22 Jun 2016
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 4 Jun; 2016
Heat detections: 202; in a single hotspot: 169 MW
Danger at start: 29; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 176MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 4 Jun22 Jun

Play back 19 Jun 2016

How it evolved, day by day

4 Jun 9 Jun 11 Jun 13 Jun 15 Jun 17 Jun

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

49km/h · peak gust

28%lowest humidity

It had gone 23 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

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

Unincorporated NT where it started

6,133 ha reached on 4 Jun

0.3 %

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 2015

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2015, 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	Danger (FWI)
4 Jun	35.2 °C	39 %	25 km/h	High 29
5 Jun	36.1 °C	30 %	23 km/h	High 28
6 Jun	35.9 °C	28 %	24 km/h	High 30
7 Jun	36.2 °C	28 %	20 km/h	High 31
8 Jun	34.0 °C	48 %	17 km/h	High 23
9 Jun	34.4 °C	40 %	24 km/h	High 26
10 Jun	34.5 °C	31 %	41 km/h	High 34
11 Jun	33.7 °C	29 %	45 km/h	Very high 38
12 Jun	31.0 °C	28 %	49 km/h	Very high 41
13 Jun	31.4 °C	28 %	45 km/h	Very high 39
14 Jun	33.1 °C	38 %	42 km/h	High 37
15 Jun	33.5 °C	38 %	42 km/h	High 36
16 Jun	33.5 °C	36 %	31 km/h	High 33
17 Jun	34.1 °C	32 %	32 km/h	High 33
18 Jun	33.8 °C	38 %	19 km/h	High 30
19 Jun	32.7 °C	38 %	38 km/h	High 36
20 Jun	32.4 °C	27 %	38 km/h	High 38
21 Jun	31.7 °C	20 %	30 km/h	High 37
22 Jun	32.4 °C	18 %	32 km/h	Very high 41
23 Jun after	33.6 °C	22 %	29 km/h	Very high 41
24 Jun after	35.1 °C	22 %	34 km/h	Very high 42
25 Jun after	34.1 °C	32 %	29 km/h	High 36
26 Jun after	34.0 °C	37 %	25 km/h	High 32
27 Jun after	34.6 °C	32 %	30 km/h	High 36
28 Jun after	33.0 °C	34 %	43 km/h	Very high 41
29 Jun after	32.2 °C	26 %	43 km/h	Very high 42

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 28 May 2016

After · 29 Jun 2016

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 · 202Every 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

All fires in Australia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Unincorporated NT fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 4 June 2016 to 22 June 2016 (19 days). The perimeter dates it from 9 June 2016 to 15 June 2016.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,256 hectares (62.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Unincorporated NT (6,133 ha, 0.3 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 36.2 °C, humidity dropped to 28 % and gusts hit 49 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 41, 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 · 2 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

25 October 2026 Last day with fire: 15 June 2016 → 22 June 2016.
25 October 2026 Start date: 9 June 2016 → 4 June 2016.

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?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

What really happened?

Your connection to the fire (optional) Email (optional)

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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 9 June 2016 to 15 June 2016. 202 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 2015, 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