How long did the West Daly fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 10 June 2017 to 30 June 2017 (21 days). The perimeter dates it from 10 June 2017 to 23 June 2017.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 5,000 hectares (50.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered West Daly (5,026 ha, 0.4 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 32.2 °C, humidity dropped to 16 % and gusts hit 49 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 51, 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.

AU · Australia · 2017-06-10 → 2017-06-30

West Daly fire, 10 June 2017 West Daly

Out · last detection 30 Jun 2017, 04:20 UTC

The fire started on 10 June 2017 in West Daly, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 21 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,000 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 3513th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3514 with a page). Number 862 in Australia in 2017, of 862.

Compare with…

Suggestions: West Daly · 2022 West Daly · 2026 West Daly · 2022 West Daly · 2018

Burnt area: 5,000ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 21days; 10 Jun 2017 – 30 Jun 2017
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 10 Jun; 2017
Heat detections: 157; in a single hotspot: 32 MW
Danger at start: 49; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 54MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 10 Jun30 Jun

Play back 30 Jun 2017

How it evolved, day by day

10 Jun 12 Jun 13 Jun 16 Jun 19 Jun 22 Jun 28 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

32°high

49km/h · peak gust

16%lowest humidity

It had gone 43 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

19% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 948 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 3.2% of the area of London (50 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

5,026 ha reached on 10 Jun

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	Danger (FWI)
10 Jun	28.4 °C	17 %	47 km/h	Very high 49
11 Jun	28.2 °C	17 %	49 km/h	Extreme 51
12 Jun	28.0 °C	18 %	48 km/h	Extreme 51
13 Jun	28.8 °C	16 %	41 km/h	Very high 47
14 Jun	30.0 °C	24 %	36 km/h	Very high 43
15 Jun	30.1 °C	23 %	44 km/h	Very high 47
16 Jun	31.0 °C	22 %	37 km/h	Very high 44
17 Jun	31.6 °C	23 %	37 km/h	Very high 45
18 Jun	31.7 °C	28 %	42 km/h	Very high 46
19 Jun	32.1 °C	25 %	41 km/h	Very high 45
20 Jun	32.2 °C	27 %	38 km/h	Very high 45
21 Jun	31.9 °C	26 %	43 km/h	Very high 46
22 Jun	31.9 °C	19 %	37 km/h	Very high 44
23 Jun	32.1 °C	34 %	35 km/h	Very high 38
24 Jun	31.7 °C	29 %	33 km/h	High 37
25 Jun	31.6 °C	28 %	27 km/h	High 35
26 Jun	30.5 °C	35 %	27 km/h	High 33
27 Jun	31.0 °C	31 %	21 km/h	High 32
28 Jun	31.5 °C	34 %	22 km/h	High 33
29 Jun	31.7 °C	29 %	48 km/h	Very high 43
30 Jun	30.1 °C	29 %	48 km/h	Very high 45
1 Jul after	30.0 °C	25 %	38 km/h	Very high 39
2 Jul after	31.8 °C	35 %	31 km/h	High 33
3 Jul after	32.9 °C	31 %	34 km/h	High 36

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 3 Jun 2017

After · 7 Jul 2017

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 · 157Every 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 10 June 2017 to 30 June 2017 (21 days). The perimeter dates it from 10 June 2017 to 23 June 2017.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 5,000 hectares (50.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered West Daly (5,026 ha, 0.4 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 32.2 °C, humidity dropped to 16 % and gusts hit 49 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 51, 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

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: 23 June 2017 → 30 June 2017.

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 do you think is wrong?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

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 10 June 2017 to 23 June 2017. 157 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