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AU · Australia · –

Victoria Daly fire, 1 September 2017 Victoria Daly

Out · last detection 10 Sept 2017, 16:19 UTC

The fire started on 1 September 2017 in Victoria Daly, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 10 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 7,966 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
7,966ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
10days
1 Sept 2017 – 10 Sept 2017
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
1 Sept
2017
Heat detections
268
in a single hotspot: 187 MW
Danger at start
65
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
356MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Sept10 Sept
10 Sept 2017

How it evolved, day by day

1 Sept 2017 · 12 MW · 5 2 Sept 2017 · 360 MW · 30 3 Sept 2017 · 760 MW · 52 4 Sept 2017 · 1,499 MW · 89 5 Sept 2017 · 382 MW · 56 6 Sept 2017 · 124 MW · 15 8 Sept 2017 · 8 MW · 6 9 Sept 2017 · 40 MW · 12 10 Sept 2017 · 18 MW · 3
1 Sept 4 Sept 8 Sept 10 Sept

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
56km/h · peak gust
5%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

25% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,005 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 5% of the area of London (80 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
    8,007 ha reached on 1 Sept
    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)

Started with Very dry air: 29 % of the area in Australia 60 days without rain: 34 % of the area in Australia

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
1 Sept 33.2 °C 8 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
2 Sept 34.7 °C 11 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
3 Sept 36.0 °C 12 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
4 Sept 35.5 °C 18 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
5 Sept 35.0 °C 14 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
6 Sept 35.2 °C 9 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 69
7 Sept 34.5 °C 6 % 56 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 85
8 Sept 31.9 °C 5 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 74
9 Sept 33.4 °C 5 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 74
10 Sept 34.4 °C 7 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 69
11 Sept after 35.3 °C 8 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
12 Sept after 36.6 °C 13 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
13 Sept after 37.7 °C 13 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
14 Sept after 35.6 °C 16 % 66 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 91
15 Sept after 34.9 °C 6 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 78
16 Sept after 35.2 °C 2 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 82
17 Sept after 34.7 °C 4 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 74
18 Sept after 35.1 °C 8 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 68
19 Sept after 36.0 °C 9 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 68
20 Sept after 36.2 °C 15 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 25 Aug 2017
After · 17 Sept 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 · 268Every 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 1 September 2017 to 10 September 2017 (10 days). The perimeter dates it from 2 September 2017 to 6 September 2017.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 7,966 hectares (79.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Victoria Daly (8,007 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 36.0 °C, humidity dropped to 5 % and gusts hit 56 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 85, class Very 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 · 2 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 6 September 2017 → 10 September 2017.
  2. Start date: 2 September 2017 → 1 September 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 2 September 2017 to 6 September 2017. 268 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.