How long did the West Arnhem fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 13 July 2020 to 2 August 2020 (21 days). The perimeter dates it from 13 July 2020 to 31 July 2020.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 14,778 hectares (147.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered West Arnhem (14,845 ha, 0.3 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 32.4 °C, humidity dropped to 17 % and gusts hit 52 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 50, class 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.

AU · Australia · 2020-07-13 → 2020-08-02

West Arnhem fire, 13 July 2020 West Arnhem

Out · last detection 2 Aug 2020, 04:52 UTC

The fire started on 13 July 2020 in West Arnhem, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 21 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 14,778 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 934th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3514 with a page). Number 64 in Australia in 2020, of 320.

Compare with…

Suggestions: West Arnhem · 2018 West Arnhem · 2016 West Arnhem · 2023 West Arnhem · 2021

Burnt area: 14,778ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 21days; 13 Jul 2020 – 2 Aug 2020
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 13 Jul; 2020
Heat detections: 715; in a single hotspot: 214 MW
Danger at start: 46; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 469MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 13 Jul2 Aug

Play back 2 Aug 2020

How it evolved, day by day

13 Jul 16 Jul 17 Jul 19 Jul 22 Jul 25 Jul 28 Jul 31 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

32°high

52km/h · peak gust

17%lowest humidity

It had gone 51 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

92% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 4,715 ha in 2016, 7,265 ha in 2017, 9,246 ha in 2018, 14 ha in 2019. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 13,654 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 9.3% of the area of London (148 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

14,845 ha reached on 13 Jul

0.3 %

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)
13 Jul	31.6 °C	21 %	52 km/h	Very high 46
14 Jul	30.9 °C	34 %	45 km/h	Very high 38
15 Jul	32.0 °C	38 %	41 km/h	High 35
16 Jul	31.6 °C	27 %	42 km/h	High 37
17 Jul	31.4 °C	23 %	40 km/h	High 37
18 Jul	32.1 °C	27 %	36 km/h	High 38
19 Jul	29.8 °C	35 %	38 km/h	High 36
20 Jul	30.0 °C	26 %	42 km/h	High 37
21 Jul	32.2 °C	20 %	40 km/h	Very high 40
22 Jul	32.4 °C	17 %	43 km/h	Very high 46
23 Jul	31.3 °C	32 %	41 km/h	Very high 39
24 Jul	31.2 °C	37 %	33 km/h	High 34
25 Jul	32.2 °C	27 %	41 km/h	High 38
26 Jul	32.3 °C	26 %	47 km/h	Very high 42
27 Jul	32.0 °C	25 %	45 km/h	Very high 42
28 Jul	31.3 °C	21 %	46 km/h	Very high 44
29 Jul	31.2 °C	21 %	48 km/h	Very high 45
30 Jul	30.4 °C	17 %	49 km/h	Very high 49
31 Jul	30.9 °C	25 %	51 km/h	Extreme 50
1 Aug	31.0 °C	26 %	49 km/h	Very high 48
2 Aug	29.4 °C	38 %	43 km/h	High 36
3 Aug after	31.4 °C	36 %	36 km/h	High 35
4 Aug after	32.4 °C	29 %	34 km/h	High 34
5 Aug after	32.3 °C	31 %	31 km/h	High 34
6 Aug after	32.3 °C	37 %	28 km/h	High 32
7 Aug after	33.3 °C	34 %	30 km/h	High 34
8 Aug after	33.6 °C	26 %	36 km/h	Very high 38
9 Aug after	33.4 °C	24 %	34 km/h	High 37
10 Aug after	32.6 °C	24 %	40 km/h	Very high 40
11 Aug after	33.9 °C	19 %	34 km/h	Very high 43
12 Aug after	31.9 °C	37 %	31 km/h	High 35

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 6 Jul 2020

After · 9 Aug 2020

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 · 715Every 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 13 July 2020 to 2 August 2020 (21 days). The perimeter dates it from 13 July 2020 to 31 July 2020.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 14,778 hectares (147.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered West Arnhem (14,845 ha, 0.3 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 32.4 °C, humidity dropped to 17 % and gusts hit 52 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 50, class 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

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 Last day with fire: 31 July 2020 → 2 August 2020.

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 13 July 2020 to 31 July 2020. 715 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