How long did the West Arnhem fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 11 June 2022 to 19 June 2022 (9 days). The perimeter dates it from 12 June 2022 to 19 June 2022.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 7,054 hectares (70.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered West Arnhem (7,097 ha, 0.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 33.0 °C, humidity dropped to 29 % and gusts hit 45 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 39, 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 · 2022-06-11 → 2022-06-19

West Arnhem fire, 11 June 2022 West Arnhem

Out · last detection 19 Jun 2022, 16:36 UTC

The fire started on 11 June 2022 in West Arnhem, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 7,054 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 2267th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3515 with a page). Number 346 in Australia in 2022, of 566.

The power measured by the satellite is low (28.4 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.

Compare with…

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

Burnt area: 7,054ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 9days; 11 Jun 2022 – 19 Jun 2022
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 11 Jun; 2022
Heat detections: 207; in a single hotspot: 28 MW
Danger at start: 39; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 149MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 11 Jun19 Jun

Play back 19 Jun 2022

How it evolved, day by day

12 Jun 14 Jun 16 Jun 18 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

33°high

45km/h · peak gust

29%lowest humidity

It had gone 29 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.0 mm on 29 Jun.

This area had burned before

86% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,730 ha in 2016, 1,177 ha in 2017, 3,800 ha in 2018, 1,652 ha in 2019, 1,942 ha in 2020, 802 ha in 2021. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 6,056 ha that had burned before.

2,433 ha West Arnhem fire, May 2018 10,614 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 4.5% of the area of London (71 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

7,097 ha reached on 12 Jun

0.1 %

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	Rain	Danger (FWI)
11 Jun	29.6 °C	32 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
12 Jun	30.0 °C	40 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
13 Jun	30.8 °C	33 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
14 Jun	30.8 °C	39 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
15 Jun	32.4 °C	32 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
16 Jun	32.5 °C	39 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
17 Jun	32.7 °C	34 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
18 Jun	32.6 °C	32 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
19 Jun	33.0 °C	29 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
20 Jun after	31.5 °C	37 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
21 Jun after	31.7 °C	28 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
22 Jun after	31.8 °C	32 %	55 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
23 Jun after	31.7 °C	35 %	53 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
24 Jun after	31.2 °C	36 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	High 38
25 Jun after	31.3 °C	39 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
26 Jun after	32.1 °C	36 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
27 Jun after	30.3 °C	40 %	57 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 42
28 Jun after	30.6 °C	37 %	53 km/h	0.5 mm	Very high 40
29 Jun after	30.3 °C	32 %	45 km/h	2.0 mm	High 25

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 4 Jun 2022

After · 26 Jun 2022

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 · 207Every 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 11 June 2022 to 19 June 2022 (9 days). The perimeter dates it from 12 June 2022 to 19 June 2022.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 7,054 hectares (70.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered West Arnhem (7,097 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 33.0 °C, humidity dropped to 29 % and gusts hit 45 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 39, 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: 12 June 2022 → 11 June 2022.

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 12 June 2022 to 19 June 2022. 207 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