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AU · Australia · –

Victoria Daly fire, 23 July 2016 Victoria Daly, Unincorporated NT

Out · last detection 11 Aug 2016, 16:25 UTC

The fire started on 23 July 2016 in Victoria Daly, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 20 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 10,562 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

This entry is probably a savanna fire in Australia’s tropical north, not a bushfire like those in the south of the country. Millions of hectares of northern savanna and grassland burn every year: much of it in burns lit on purpose early in the dry season (traditional fire management, parks and cattle stations), the rest in grass fires that return to the same ground every few years. This is our assumption, based on the location; it is not confirmed. That is why it is left out of the wildfire rankings.

Burnt area
10,562ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
20days
23 Jul 2016 – 11 Aug 2016
Municipalities hit
2
local government areas
Started on
23 Jul
2016
Heat detections
453
in a single hotspot: 37 MW
Danger at start
33
High · FWI index
Average daily power
110MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 23 Jul11 Aug
11 Aug 2016

How it evolved, day by day

25 Jul 2016 · 109 MW · 11 26 Jul 2016 · 74 MW · 13 27 Jul 2016 · 127 MW · 38 28 Jul 2016 · 114 MW · 36 29 Jul 2016 · 55 MW · 18 30 Jul 2016 · 117 MW · 39 31 Jul 2016 · 363 MW · 82 1 Aug 2016 · 237 MW · 44 2 Aug 2016 · 58 MW · 25 3 Aug 2016 · 80 MW · 31 4 Aug 2016 · 74 MW · 28 5 Aug 2016 · 109 MW · 39 6 Aug 2016 · 111 MW · 25 7 Aug 2016 · 86 MW · 13 9 Aug 2016 · 44 MW · 4 11 Aug 2016 · 8 MW · 7
25 Jul 31 Jul 6 Aug

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

The weather it burned in

33°high
47km/h · peak gust
14%lowest humidity

It had gone 9 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?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 6.7% of the area of London (106 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. Victoria Daly where it started
    10,445 ha reached on 25 Jul
    0.1 %
  2. 75 ha
    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 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 Rain Danger (FWI)
23 Jul 32.4 °C 35 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
24 Jul 32.8 °C 34 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
25 Jul 32.2 °C 28 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
26 Jul 31.2 °C 26 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
27 Jul 30.7 °C 19 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
28 Jul 29.4 °C 18 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
29 Jul 30.5 °C 18 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
30 Jul 30.5 °C 19 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
31 Jul 31.5 °C 18 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
1 Aug 31.9 °C 22 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
2 Aug 32.9 °C 19 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
3 Aug 27.6 °C 19 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
4 Aug 26.3 °C 14 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
5 Aug 27.0 °C 14 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
6 Aug 28.9 °C 14 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
7 Aug 30.6 °C 18 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
8 Aug 30.7 °C 19 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
9 Aug 32.1 °C 24 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
10 Aug 32.3 °C 24 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
11 Aug 33.3 °C 24 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
12 Aug after 33.2 °C 19 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
13 Aug after 33.5 °C 14 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
14 Aug after 32.4 °C 19 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
15 Aug after 32.1 °C 15 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
16 Aug after 32.8 °C 15 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
17 Aug after 32.0 °C 20 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
18 Aug after 31.0 °C 33 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
19 Aug after 29.7 °C 33 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
20 Aug after 32.9 °C 22 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
21 Aug after 32.3 °C 25 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 16 Jul 2016
After · 18 Aug 2016

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 · 453Every 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 Victoria Daly fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 23 July 2016 to 11 August 2016 (20 days). The perimeter dates it from 25 July 2016 to 11 August 2016.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 10,562 hectares (105.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Victoria Daly (10,445 ha, 0.1 %); Unincorporated NT (75 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 33.3 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 47 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 50, 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

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Start date: 25 July 2016 → 23 July 2016.

RSS Changes to this page With cross-checks and a citable version

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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 25 July 2016 to 11 August 2016. 453 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.
  • Probably a vegetation burn: not counted in the totals.

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.