How long did the West Daly fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 6 May 2018 and 1 June 2018: 27 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 35,586 hectares (355.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered West Daly (35,844 ha, 2.5 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 34.2 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 56 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 57, 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 · 2018-05-06 → 2018-06-01

West Daly fire, 6 May 2018 West Daly

Out · last detection 2 Jun 2018, 05:42 UTC

The fire started on 6 May 2018 in West Daly, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 27 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 35,586 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 286th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3496 with a page). Number 53 in Australia in 2018, of 923.

Compare with…

Suggestions: West Daly · 2016 West Daly · 2017 West Daly · 2017 West Daly · 2017

Burnt area: 35,586ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 27days; 6 May 2018 – 1 Jun 2018
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 6 May; 2018
Heat detections: 1,582; in a single hotspot: 155 MW
Danger at start: 42; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 521MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 6 May1 Jun

Play back 2 Jun 2018

How it evolved, day by day

6 May 10 May 14 May 18 May 23 May 28 May 1 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

34°high

56km/h · peak gust

14%lowest humidity

It had gone 2 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

86% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 28,178 ha in 2016, 8,745 ha in 2017. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 30,493 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 22% of the area of London (356 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

35,844 ha reached on 6 May

2.5 %

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)
6 May	34.2 °C	22 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 42
7 May	33.7 °C	22 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 42
8 May	34.0 °C	24 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 42
9 May	34.2 °C	22 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
10 May	33.7 °C	19 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 49
11 May	33.2 °C	16 %	54 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 55
12 May	29.9 °C	20 %	51 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
13 May	29.3 °C	20 %	52 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 55
14 May	30.3 °C	20 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
15 May	29.5 °C	17 %	51 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 56
16 May	28.8 °C	17 %	53 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 56
17 May	28.8 °C	19 %	53 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
18 May	29.5 °C	22 %	53 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 55
19 May	29.8 °C	20 %	50 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
20 May	31.7 °C	28 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
21 May	32.2 °C	28 %	49 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 49
22 May	31.2 °C	24 %	51 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 52
23 May	31.6 °C	24 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
24 May	32.5 °C	26 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
25 May	33.2 °C	24 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
26 May	33.2 °C	26 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
27 May	33.1 °C	28 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 42
28 May	33.4 °C	25 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 44
29 May	32.9 °C	23 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
30 May	31.5 °C	24 %	56 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
31 May	31.6 °C	26 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 50
1 Jun	31.5 °C	27 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
2 Jun after	31.2 °C	28 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 44
3 Jun after	30.2 °C	14 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 51
4 Jun after	29.2 °C	15 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 53
5 Jun after	29.4 °C	14 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 50
6 Jun after	29.5 °C	15 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
7 Jun after	30.4 °C	29 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 41
8 Jun after	31.1 °C	31 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 42
9 Jun after	32.5 °C	28 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
10 Jun after	33.5 °C	22 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
11 Jun after	32.7 °C	26 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
12 Jun after	32.0 °C	37 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
13 Jun after	32.2 °C	40 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
14 Jun after	32.3 °C	36 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
15 Jun after	32.1 °C	34 %	43 km/h	0.9 mm	High 33
16 Jun after	32.1 °C	29 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 41
17 Jun after	30.7 °C	20 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 46
18 Jun after	30.1 °C	22 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 44

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 29 Apr 2018

After · 8 Jun 2018

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 · 1,582Every 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?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 6 May 2018 and 1 June 2018: 27 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 35,586 hectares (355.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered West Daly (35,844 ha, 2.5 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 34.2 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 56 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 57, 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 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 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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 1,582 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