How long did the West Arnhem fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 18 June 2019 to 4 July 2019 (17 days). The perimeter dates it from 19 June 2019 to 4 July 2019.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 9,025 hectares (90.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered West Arnhem (9,087 ha, 0.2 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 33.1 °C, humidity dropped to 16 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 40, 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.

AU · Australia · 2019-06-18 → 2019-07-04

West Arnhem fire, 18 June 2019 West Arnhem

Out · last detection 4 Jul 2019, 04:58 UTC

The fire started on 18 June 2019 in West Arnhem, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 17 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 9,025 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1667th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3514 with a page). Number 416 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: West Arnhem · 2017 West Arnhem · 2026 West Arnhem · 2023 West Arnhem · 2018

Burnt area: 9,025ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 17days; 18 Jun 2019 – 4 Jul 2019
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 18 Jun; 2019
Heat detections: 257; in a single hotspot: 66 MW
Danger at start: 39; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 95MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 18 Jun4 Jul

Play back 4 Jul 2019

How it evolved, day by day

18 Jun 21 Jun 24 Jun 27 Jun 30 Jun 3 Jul

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

The weather it burned in

33°high

48km/h · peak gust

16%lowest humidity

It had gone 44 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

65% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 969 ha in 2016, 5,448 ha in 2017, 2,317 ha in 2018. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 5,857 ha that had burned before.

1,282 ha West Arnhem fire, September 2017 10,474 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 5.7% of the area of London (90 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

West Arnhem where it started

9,087 ha reached on 18 Jun

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 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)

Day	High	Min. humidity	Peak gust	Danger (FWI)
18 Jun	32.3 °C	24 %	45 km/h	Very high 39
19 Jun	30.8 °C	25 %	32 km/h	High 34
20 Jun	31.2 °C	27 %	35 km/h	High 36
21 Jun	30.6 °C	26 %	37 km/h	High 37
22 Jun	30.6 °C	29 %	35 km/h	High 36
23 Jun	30.7 °C	24 %	32 km/h	High 36
24 Jun	30.4 °C	17 %	33 km/h	Very high 39
25 Jun	31.0 °C	16 %	34 km/h	Very high 40
26 Jun	30.4 °C	18 %	34 km/h	Very high 40
27 Jun	30.5 °C	25 %	34 km/h	Very high 39
28 Jun	30.9 °C	29 %	26 km/h	High 33
29 Jun	32.8 °C	29 %	33 km/h	Very high 39
30 Jun	33.1 °C	37 %	48 km/h	Very high 39
1 Jul	32.8 °C	27 %	42 km/h	Very high 38
2 Jul	32.0 °C	19 %	38 km/h	Very high 40
3 Jul	31.4 °C	22 %	36 km/h	Very high 40
4 Jul	30.7 °C	23 %	33 km/h	Very high 39
5 Jul after	30.7 °C	22 %	30 km/h	High 36
6 Jul after	30.5 °C	25 %	26 km/h	High 36
7 Jul after	31.6 °C	19 %	38 km/h	Very high 42
8 Jul after	32.4 °C	28 %	31 km/h	High 37
9 Jul after	32.7 °C	27 %	34 km/h	Very high 39
10 Jul after	31.9 °C	27 %	34 km/h	Very high 40
11 Jul after	31.2 °C	26 %	37 km/h	Very high 41
12 Jul after	32.4 °C	30 %	35 km/h	Very high 40
13 Jul after	32.2 °C	28 %	45 km/h	Very high 44
14 Jul after	30.5 °C	26 %	48 km/h	Very high 48

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 11 Jun 2019

After · 11 Jul 2019

Before After

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 · 257Every 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 time	Satellite	FRP (MW)	Lat	Lon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Australia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the West Arnhem fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 18 June 2019 to 4 July 2019 (17 days). The perimeter dates it from 19 June 2019 to 4 July 2019.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 9,025 hectares (90.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered West Arnhem (9,087 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 33.1 °C, humidity dropped to 16 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 40, 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

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

26 October 2026 Start date: 19 June 2019 → 18 June 2019.

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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What really happened?

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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.
Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 19 June 2019 to 4 July 2019. 257 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.

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.

Where it burned