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West Arnhem fire, 2 August 2022 West Arnhem

Out · last measured on 4 Aug 2022

The fire started on 2 August 2022 in West Arnhem, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 13,028 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1070th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3503 with a page). Number 133 in Australia in 2022, of 566.

Compare with…

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

We have the GWIS perimeter for this fire, but the VIIRS sensors did not capture it in enough detail: no day-by-day evolution, but the split by municipality is there.

Burnt area
13,028ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
3days
2 Aug 2022 – 4 Aug 2022
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
2 Aug
2022
Danger at start
37
High · FWI index

Where it burned

The weather it burned in

36°high
44km/h · peak gust
24%lowest humidity

It had gone 34 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

96% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,738 ha in 2016, 756 ha in 2017, 9,323 ha in 2018, 11,418 ha in 2019, 2,585 ha in 2020, 2,195 ha in 2021. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 12,538 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 8.2% of the area of London (130 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
    13,108 ha
    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 Rain Danger (FWI)
2 Aug 34.4 °C 30 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
3 Aug 33.3 °C 42 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
4 Aug 35.2 °C 34 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
5 Aug after 33.5 °C 42 % 25 km/h 0.2 mm High 31
6 Aug after 36.2 °C 30 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
7 Aug after 35.5 °C 30 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
8 Aug after 35.1 °C 30 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
9 Aug after 34.0 °C 32 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
10 Aug after 35.2 °C 24 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
11 Aug after 34.3 °C 31 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
12 Aug after 34.4 °C 27 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
13 Aug after 34.8 °C 25 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
14 Aug after 34.8 °C 23 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
15 Aug after 33.0 °C 16 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
16 Aug after 33.9 °C 9 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
17 Aug after 33.6 °C 13 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
18 Aug after 32.8 °C 13 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
19 Aug after 32.7 °C 22 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
20 Aug after 33.0 °C 27 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
21 Aug after 33.7 °C 24 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 26 Jul 2022
After · 11 Aug 2022

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 4 August 2022 the air beside the fire reached 47 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 20: 1.3 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak47 µg/m³
Days over the guideline1 day
PM1067 µg/m³
Optical depth0.21
4567
Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

Particles from the Copernicus CAMS model at the centre of the perimeter; these are not measurements in each town. The pale bar is the worst hour, the solid one the daily average.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)

Other fires nearby

All fires in Australia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the West Arnhem fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 2 August 2022 and 4 August 2022: 3 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 13,028 hectares (130.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered West Arnhem (13,108 ha, 0.3 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 36.2 °C, humidity dropped to 24 % and gusts hit 44 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 42, 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.

Report an error
What do you think is wrong?

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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. No 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.