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AU · Australia · –

Victoria Daly fire, 16 June 2017 Victoria Daly

Out · last detection 27 Jun 2017, 05:16 UTC

The fire started on 16 June 2017 in Victoria Daly, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 7,368 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
7,368ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
12days
16 Jun 2017 – 27 Jun 2017
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
16 Jun
2017
Heat detections
235
in a single hotspot: 83 MW
Danger at start
38
High · FWI index
Average daily power
141MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 16 Jun27 Jun
27 Jun 2017

How it evolved, day by day

16 Jun 2017 · 8 MW · 10 17 Jun 2017 · 347 MW · 60 18 Jun 2017 · 32 MW · 10 19 Jun 2017 · 151 MW · 13 20 Jun 2017 · 75 MW · 15 21 Jun 2017 · 60 MW · 13 22 Jun 2017 · 82 MW · 19 23 Jun 2017 · 138 MW · 25 24 Jun 2017 · 263 MW · 29 25 Jun 2017 · 488 MW · 29 26 Jun 2017 · 46 MW · 11 27 Jun 2017 · 5 MW · 1
16 Jun 19 Jun 22 Jun 25 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

32°high
42km/h · peak gust
23%lowest humidity

It had gone 49 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

12% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 910 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 4.7% of the area of London (74 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
    7,357 ha reached on 16 Jun
    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)
16 Jun 30.3 °C 27 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
17 Jun 31.3 °C 33 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
18 Jun 31.2 °C 27 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
19 Jun 31.5 °C 27 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
20 Jun 31.7 °C 32 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
21 Jun 31.0 °C 30 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
22 Jun 31.0 °C 23 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
23 Jun 31.7 °C 30 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
24 Jun 31.5 °C 29 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
25 Jun 30.7 °C 30 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
26 Jun 30.7 °C 32 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
27 Jun 30.9 °C 34 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
28 Jun after 31.0 °C 38 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
29 Jun after 30.3 °C 40 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
30 Jun after 28.6 °C 31 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
1 Jul after 28.8 °C 26 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
2 Jul after 31.2 °C 40 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
3 Jul after 32.4 °C 38 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
4 Jul after 34.3 °C 35 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
5 Jul after 33.8 °C 37 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
6 Jul after 33.4 °C 40 % 20 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
7 Jul after 32.9 °C 41 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 29

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 9 Jun 2017
After · 4 Jul 2017

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 · 235Every 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 16 June 2017 to 27 June 2017 (12 days). The perimeter dates it from 16 June 2017 to 26 June 2017.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 7,368 hectares (73.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Victoria Daly (7,357 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 31.7 °C, humidity dropped to 23 % and gusts hit 42 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

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: 26 June 2017 → 27 June 2017.

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 16 June 2017 to 26 June 2017. 235 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.