How long did the West Arnhem fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 1 July 2022 to 17 July 2022 (17 days). The perimeter dates it from 1 July 2022 to 10 July 2022.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 5,950 hectares (59.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered West Arnhem (5,976 ha, 0.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 30.2 °C, humidity dropped to 26 % and gusts hit 45 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 · 2022-07-01 → 2022-07-17

West Arnhem fire, 1 July 2022 West Arnhem

Out · last detection 18 Jul 2022, 04:46 UTC

The fire started on 1 July 2022 in West Arnhem, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 17 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,950 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 2806th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3503 with a page). Number 435 in Australia in 2022, of 566.

Compare with…

Suggestions: West Arnhem · 2018 West Arnhem · 2020 West Arnhem · 2016 West Arnhem · 2021

Burnt area: 5,950ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 17days; 1 Jul 2022 – 17 Jul 2022
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 1 Jul; 2022
Heat detections: 265; in a single hotspot: 50 MW
Danger at start: 21; Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power: 104MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Jul17 Jul

Play back 18 Jul 2022

How it evolved, day by day

1 Jul 4 Jul 7 Jul 10 Jul 13 Jul 17 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

30°high

45km/h · peak gust

26%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

93% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 479 ha in 2016, 527 ha in 2017, 4,307 ha in 2018, 172 ha in 2019, 5,136 ha in 2020, 765 ha in 2021. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 5,561 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 3.8% of the area of London (60 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

5,976 ha reached on 1 Jul

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)
1 Jul	30.2 °C	45 %	45 km/h	1.1 mm	Moderate 21
2 Jul	30.1 °C	40 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
3 Jul	30.0 °C	41 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
4 Jul	30.1 °C	31 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
5 Jul	28.1 °C	29 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
6 Jul	28.1 °C	26 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
7 Jul	28.4 °C	31 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
8 Jul	30.1 °C	26 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
9 Jul	30.0 °C	29 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
10 Jul	29.8 °C	32 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
11 Jul	30.0 °C	30 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
12 Jul	30.2 °C	18 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 42
13 Jul	29.5 °C	28 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 46
14 Jul	28.9 °C	28 %	49 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 46
15 Jul	29.3 °C	35 %	49 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 42
16 Jul	29.8 °C	40 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
17 Jul	29.7 °C	32 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
18 Jul after	30.9 °C	33 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
19 Jul after	33.1 °C	30 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
20 Jul after	32.3 °C	23 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 24 Jun 2022

After · 24 Jul 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 · 265Every 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 1 July 2022 to 17 July 2022 (17 days). The perimeter dates it from 1 July 2022 to 10 July 2022.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 5,950 hectares (59.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered West Arnhem (5,976 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 30.2 °C, humidity dropped to 26 % and gusts hit 45 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 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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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 1 July 2022 to 10 July 2022. 265 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