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West Arnhem fire, 1 September 2017 West Arnhem

Out · last detection 24 Sept 2017, 04:09 UTC

The fire started on 1 September 2017 in West Arnhem, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 24 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 44,036 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 209th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3503 with a page). Number 37 in Australia in 2017, of 862.

Compare with…

Suggestions: West Arnhem · 2019West Arnhem · 2018West Arnhem · 2024West Arnhem · 2018

Burnt area
44,036ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
24days
1 Sept 2017 – 24 Sept 2017
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
1 Sept
2017
Heat detections
1,806
in a single hotspot: 306 MW
Danger at start
37
High · FWI index
Average daily power
1.1GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Sept24 Sept
24 Sept 2017

How it evolved, day by day

1 Sept 2017 · 35 MW · 8 2 Sept 2017 · 581 MW · 39 3 Sept 2017 · 270 MW · 47 4 Sept 2017 · 2,626 MW · 122 5 Sept 2017 · 8,049 MW · 231 6 Sept 2017 · 3,176 MW · 226 7 Sept 2017 · 5,545 MW · 357 8 Sept 2017 · 1,057 MW · 208 9 Sept 2017 · 781 MW · 131 10 Sept 2017 · 469 MW · 97 11 Sept 2017 · 548 MW · 84 12 Sept 2017 · 80 MW · 17 13 Sept 2017 · 323 MW · 36 14 Sept 2017 · 41 MW · 15 15 Sept 2017 · 342 MW · 54 16 Sept 2017 · 116 MW · 27 17 Sept 2017 · 145 MW · 31 18 Sept 2017 · 121 MW · 22 19 Sept 2017 · 36 MW · 8 21 Sept 2017 · 16 MW · 4 22 Sept 2017 · 50 MW · 13 23 Sept 2017 · 114 MW · 12 24 Sept 2017 · 7 MW · 2
1 Sept 5 Sept 9 Sept 13 Sept 17 Sept 22 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

35°high
56km/h · peak gust
20%lowest humidity

It had gone 14 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 4.7 mm on 2 Oct.

This area had burned before

10% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 4,490 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 28% of the area of London (440 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. West Arnhem where it started
    43,952 ha reached on 1 Sept
    0.9 %

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)
1 Sept 33.3 °C 31 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
2 Sept 33.6 °C 29 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
3 Sept 33.2 °C 37 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
4 Sept 32.8 °C 34 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
5 Sept 32.1 °C 28 % 56 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
6 Sept 32.3 °C 33 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
7 Sept 33.3 °C 20 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
8 Sept 32.1 °C 21 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
9 Sept 30.9 °C 34 % 56 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
10 Sept 30.7 °C 37 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
11 Sept 32.6 °C 29 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
12 Sept 32.3 °C 48 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
13 Sept 32.6 °C 43 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
14 Sept 32.8 °C 45 % 48 km/h 0.1 mm High 32
15 Sept 34.5 °C 20 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
16 Sept 32.2 °C 38 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
17 Sept 33.2 °C 29 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
18 Sept 33.3 °C 31 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
19 Sept 32.9 °C 42 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
20 Sept 31.6 °C 50 % 53 km/h 0.4 mm High 34
21 Sept 33.2 °C 40 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
22 Sept 32.0 °C 46 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
23 Sept 33.4 °C 41 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
24 Sept 33.6 °C 42 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
25 Sept after 34.7 °C 35 % 34 km/h 0.1 mm High 31
26 Sept after 33.9 °C 40 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
27 Sept after 33.9 °C 33 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
28 Sept after 32.6 °C 47 % 30 km/h 1.3 mm Moderate 17
29 Sept after 33.6 °C 45 % 35 km/h 0.7 mm High 23
30 Sept after 33.8 °C 41 % 27 km/h 0.4 mm High 25
1 Oct after 33.4 °C 44 % 30 km/h 9.5 mm Low 5
2 Oct after 33.7 °C 42 % 31 km/h 4.7 mm Low 6

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 25 Aug 2017
After · 1 Oct 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 · 1,806Every 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 West Arnhem fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 1 September 2017 and 24 September 2017: 24 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 44,036 hectares (440.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered West Arnhem (43,952 ha, 0.9 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 34.7 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 56 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 49, 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 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

No changes since 24 October 2026.

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.

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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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 1,806 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.