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AU · Australia · –

Victoria Daly fire, 3 June 2019 Victoria Daly

Out · last detection 14 Jun 2019, 04:33 UTC

The fire started on 3 June 2019 in Victoria Daly, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 8,484 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
8,484ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
12days
3 Jun 2019 – 14 Jun 2019
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
3 Jun
2019
Heat detections
310
in a single hotspot: 0 MW
Danger at start
45
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
96MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 3 Jun14 Jun
14 Jun 2019

How it evolved, day by day

3 Jun 2019 · 61 MW · 14 5 Jun 2019 · 11 MW · 7 6 Jun 2019 · 142 MW · 59 7 Jun 2019 · 157 MW · 57 8 Jun 2019 · 147 MW · 48 9 Jun 2019 · 102 MW · 25 10 Jun 2019 · 161 MW · 32 11 Jun 2019 · 82 MW · 25 12 Jun 2019 · 120 MW · 29 13 Jun 2019 · 54 MW · 10 14 Jun 2019 · 18 MW · 4
3 Jun 7 Jun 10 Jun 13 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

34°high
52km/h · peak gust
15%lowest humidity

It had gone 29 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

71% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,884 ha in 2016, 5,412 ha in 2017, 1,661 ha in 2018. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 6,039 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 5.4% of the area of London (85 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
    8,445 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 2020
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2020, 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 Strong wind: 39 % of the area in Australia

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
3 Jun 26.9 °C 20 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
4 Jun 25.9 °C 19 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
5 Jun 26.1 °C 15 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
6 Jun 26.9 °C 16 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
7 Jun 28.5 °C 16 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
8 Jun 30.6 °C 38 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
9 Jun 31.7 °C 39 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
10 Jun 34.2 °C 29 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
11 Jun 33.7 °C 33 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
12 Jun 33.7 °C 29 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
13 Jun 33.2 °C 32 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
14 Jun 32.5 °C 31 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
15 Jun after 32.1 °C 28 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
16 Jun after 32.3 °C 32 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
17 Jun after 31.7 °C 27 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
18 Jun after 31.2 °C 23 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
19 Jun after 28.4 °C 13 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
20 Jun after 28.8 °C 18 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
21 Jun after 28.4 °C 18 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
22 Jun after 28.1 °C 20 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
23 Jun after 28.5 °C 15 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
24 Jun after 28.5 °C 11 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 27 May 2019
After · 21 Jun 2019

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 · 0Every 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?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 3 June 2019 and 14 June 2019: 12 days between the first and last heat detection of the perimeter.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 8,484 hectares (84.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Victoria Daly (8,445 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 34.2 °C, humidity dropped to 15 % and gusts hit 52 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 45, 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 · 4 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 20 June 2019 → 14 June 2019.
  2. Start date: 30 May 2019 → 3 June 2019.
  3. Last day with fire: 14 June 2019 → 20 June 2019.
  4. Start date: 3 June 2019 → 30 May 2019.

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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. No 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 2020, 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.