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Warrumbungle fire, February 2017 Warrumbungle, Mid-Western, Upper Hunter

Out · last detection 19 Feb 2017, 03:31 UTC

The fire started on 11 February 2017 in Warrumbungle, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 23,584 hectares from heat detections, spread across 3 municipalities.

It is the 34th largest in New South Wales since 2016 (of 130 with a page). Number 80 in Australia in 2017, of 862.

Compare with…
Burnt area
23,584ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
9days
11 Feb 2017 – 19 Feb 2017
Municipalities hit
3
local government areas
Started on
11 Feb
2017
Heat detections
1,047
in a single hotspot: 1,271 MW
Danger at start
56
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
8.4GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 11 Feb19 Feb
19 Feb 2017

How it evolved, day by day

11 Feb 2017 · 7,159 MW · 108 12 Feb 2017 · 50,408 MW · 688 13 Feb 2017 · 1,137 MW · 240 14 Feb 2017 · 13 MW · 7 15 Feb 2017 · 1 MW · 1 18 Feb 2017 · 1 MW · 2 19 Feb 2017 · 5 MW · 1
11 Feb 12 Feb 13 Feb 14 Feb 15 Feb 18 Feb 19 Feb

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

The weather it burned in

42°high
75km/h · peak gust
11%lowest humidity

It had gone 6 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.0 mm on 28 Feb.

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 15% of the area of London (236 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. Warrumbungle where it started
    19,768 ha reached on 11 Feb
    1.6 %
  2. Mid-Western
    2,133 ha reached on 12 Feb
    0.2 %
  3. Upper Hunter
    1,869 ha reached on 12 Feb
    0.2 %

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 area3.3 ha
Residents≈ 30

Inside the perimeter there were about 3.3 hectares of built-up land and about 30 residents (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)
11 Feb 42.1 °C 11 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
12 Feb 41.2 °C 13 % 75 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 82
13 Feb 30.8 °C 14 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
14 Feb 29.0 °C 35 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
15 Feb 31.1 °C 25 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
16 Feb 34.9 °C 18 % 35 km/h 0.5 mm Very high 38
17 Feb 35.2 °C 30 % 50 km/h 2.6 mm High 26
18 Feb 36.6 °C 19 % 63 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
19 Feb 27.4 °C 19 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
20 Feb after 25.2 °C 14 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
21 Feb after 30.6 °C 10 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
22 Feb after 33.0 °C 19 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
23 Feb after 34.6 °C 17 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
24 Feb after 34.6 °C 23 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
25 Feb after 29.2 °C 41 % 55 km/h 0.7 mm High 34
26 Feb after 26.3 °C 41 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
27 Feb after 26.9 °C 38 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
28 Feb after 27.2 °C 44 % 46 km/h 2.0 mm Moderate 15

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 4 Feb 2017
After · 26 Feb 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 · 1,047Every 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

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Warrumbungle fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 11 February 2017 to 19 February 2017 (9 days). The perimeter dates it from 11 February 2017 to 15 February 2017.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 23,584 hectares (235.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 3 municipalities: Warrumbungle (19,768 ha, 1.6 %); Mid-Western (2,133 ha, 0.2 %); Upper Hunter (1,869 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 42.1 °C, humidity dropped to 11 % and gusts hit 75 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 82, 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 15 February 2017 → 19 February 2017.

RSS Changes to this page

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 11 February 2017 to 15 February 2017. 1,047 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.

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.