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West Daly fire, 30 May 2017 West Daly

Out · last detection 5 Jun 2017, 05:29 UTC

The fire started on 30 May 2017 in West Daly, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,276 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 3253th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3496 with a page). Number 797 in Australia in 2017, of 862.

Compare with…

Suggestions: West Daly · 2016West Daly · 2018West Daly · 2017West Daly · 2025

Burnt area
5,276ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
6days
30 May 2017 – 4 Jun 2017
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
30 May
2017
Heat detections
124
in a single hotspot: 31 MW
Danger at start
52
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
107MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 30 May4 Jun
5 Jun 2017

How it evolved, day by day

30 May 2017 · 11 MW · 6 31 May 2017 · 85 MW · 41 1 Jun 2017 · 309 MW · 41 2 Jun 2017 · 65 MW · 13 3 Jun 2017 · 151 MW · 14 5 Jun 2017 · 20 MW · 3
30 May 31 May 1 Jun 2 Jun 3 Jun 5 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

31°high
52km/h · peak gust
17%lowest humidity

It had gone 32 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

49% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,564 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 3.3% of the area of London (53 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 Daly where it started
    5,302 ha reached on 30 May
    0.4 %

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)
30 May 31.4 °C 17 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
31 May 30.0 °C 18 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
1 Jun 29.2 °C 19 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
2 Jun 30.4 °C 27 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
3 Jun 31.0 °C 26 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
4 Jun 30.9 °C 32 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
5 Jun after 31.6 °C 35 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
6 Jun after 30.1 °C 24 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
7 Jun after 28.9 °C 23 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
8 Jun after 27.8 °C 17 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
9 Jun after 27.4 °C 19 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
10 Jun after 27.8 °C 17 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
11 Jun after 27.7 °C 18 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
12 Jun after 27.4 °C 19 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
13 Jun after 28.3 °C 17 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
14 Jun after 29.5 °C 26 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 23 May 2017
After · 11 Jun 2017

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 · 124Every 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 timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Australia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the West Daly fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 30 May 2017 and 4 June 2017: 6 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 5,276 hectares (52.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered West Daly (5,302 ha, 0.4 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 31.4 °C, humidity dropped to 17 % and gusts hit 52 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 53, 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

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. 124 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.