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AU · Australia · –

Victoria Daly fire, 14 November 2016 Victoria Daly

Out · last detection 20 Nov 2016, 05:23 UTC

The fire started on 14 November 2016 in Victoria Daly, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 10 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,248 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

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
6,248ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
10days
14 Nov 2016 – 23 Nov 2016
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
14 Nov
2016
Heat detections
192
in a single hotspot: 79 MW
Danger at start
41
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
377MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 14 Nov23 Nov
20 Nov 2016

How it evolved, day by day

14 Nov 2016 · 15 MW · 2 15 Nov 2016 · 630 MW · 42 16 Nov 2016 · 844 MW · 44 17 Nov 2016 · 719 MW · 53 18 Nov 2016 · 227 MW · 19 19 Nov 2016 · 111 MW · 16 20 Nov 2016 · 96 MW · 16
14 Nov 16 Nov 18 Nov 20 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

38°high
41km/h · peak gust
12%lowest humidity

It had gone 23 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 3.1 mm on 24 Nov.

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 3.9% of the area of London (62 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
    6,267 ha reached on 14 Nov
    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)
14 Nov 33.8 °C 42 % 38 km/h 0.9 mm Very high 41
15 Nov 36.2 °C 16 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
16 Nov 37.4 °C 12 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
17 Nov 38.5 °C 18 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 64
18 Nov 36.6 °C 28 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
19 Nov 36.1 °C 26 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
20 Nov 36.3 °C 30 % 25 km/h 0.9 mm High 37
21 Nov 36.3 °C 33 % 24 km/h 0.9 mm High 30
22 Nov 33.9 °C 43 % 27 km/h 3.1 mm Moderate 14
23 Nov 33.5 °C 47 % 24 km/h 3.2 mm Low 7
24 Nov after 35.4 °C 40 % 24 km/h 3.1 mm Low 8

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 7 Nov 2016
After · 30 Nov 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 · 192Every 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 14 November 2016 to 23 November 2016 (10 days). The perimeter dates it from 14 November 2016 to 20 November 2016.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,248 hectares (62.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Victoria Daly (6,267 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 38.5 °C, humidity dropped to 12 % and gusts hit 41 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 64, class Extreme.
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. Last day with fire: 20 November 2016 → 23 November 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 14 November 2016 to 20 November 2016. 192 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.