How long did the West Daly fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 4 November 2016 to 19 November 2016 (16 days). The perimeter dates it from 4 November 2016 to 13 November 2016.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 8,821 hectares (88.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered West Daly (8,854 ha, 0.6 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 33.6 °C, humidity dropped to 50 % and gusts hit 39 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 15, class Moderate.

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 · 2016-11-04 → 2016-11-19

West Daly fire, 4 November 2016 West Daly

Out · last detection 19 Nov 2016, 16:50 UTC

The fire started on 4 November 2016 in West Daly, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 16 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 8,821 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1706th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3503 with a page). Number 190 in Australia in 2016, of 427.

Compare with…

Suggestions: West Daly · 2023 West Daly · 2025 West Daly · 2017 West Daly · 2018

Burnt area: 8,821ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 16days; 4 Nov 2016 – 19 Nov 2016
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 4 Nov; 2016
Heat detections: 357; in a single hotspot: 78 MW
Danger at start: 7; Low · FWI index
Average daily power: 315MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 4 Nov19 Nov

Play back 19 Nov 2016

How it evolved, day by day

4 Nov 8 Nov 10 Nov 12 Nov 16 Nov

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

The weather it burned in

34°high

39km/h · peak gust

50%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 5.8 mm on 21 Nov.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 5.6% of the area of London (88 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 Daly where it started

8,854 ha reached on 4 Nov

0.6 %

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 2015

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2015, 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)
29 Oct	32.4 °C	63 %	28 km/h	0.5 mm	Low 7
30 Oct	33.0 °C	59 %	30 km/h	0.1 mm	Low 10
31 Oct	31.4 °C	69 %	32 km/h	0.4 mm	Low 11
1 Nov	30.1 °C	69 %	25 km/h	2.6 mm	Very low 3
2 Nov	33.6 °C	51 %	28 km/h	2.4 mm	Very low 5
3 Nov	33.4 °C	57 %	28 km/h	0.5 mm	Low 9
4 Nov	33.1 °C	59 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 11
5 Nov	32.3 °C	67 %	32 km/h	2.9 mm	Very low 3
6 Nov	30.8 °C	72 %	34 km/h	0.9 mm	Very low 4
7 Nov	32.9 °C	62 %	35 km/h	1.4 mm	Low 6
8 Nov	32.4 °C	65 %	39 km/h	0.2 mm	Low 9
9 Nov	32.2 °C	66 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Low 10
10 Nov	32.3 °C	67 %	33 km/h	0.6 mm	Low 8
11 Nov	32.1 °C	67 %	33 km/h	1.1 mm	Low 6
12 Nov	31.7 °C	65 %	30 km/h	0.3 mm	Low 8
13 Nov	33.2 °C	55 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 12
14 Nov	32.6 °C	61 %	27 km/h	0.6 mm	Low 11
15 Nov	33.2 °C	56 %	28 km/h	0.7 mm	Low 10
16 Nov	33.3 °C	50 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 15
17 Nov	32.7 °C	52 %	28 km/h	1.0 mm	Moderate 13
18 Nov	32.3 °C	60 %	29 km/h	4.2 mm	Very low 3
19 Nov	31.2 °C	66 %	34 km/h	1.2 mm	Very low 5
20 Nov after	31.6 °C	54 %	30 km/h	0.7 mm	Low 11
21 Nov after	30.5 °C	69 %	27 km/h	5.8 mm	Very low 1

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 28 Oct 2016

After · 26 Nov 2016

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 · 357Every 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 Daly fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 4 November 2016 to 19 November 2016 (16 days). The perimeter dates it from 4 November 2016 to 13 November 2016.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 8,821 hectares (88.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered West Daly (8,854 ha, 0.6 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 33.6 °C, humidity dropped to 50 % and gusts hit 39 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 15, class Moderate.
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.

25 October 2026 Last day with fire: 13 November 2016 → 19 November 2016.

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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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 4 November 2016 to 13 November 2016. 357 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 2015, 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