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West Daly fire, October 2019 West Daly

Out · last detection 23 Oct 2019, 16:25 UTC

The fire started on 13 October 2019 in West Daly, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 11 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 11,365 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1258th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3511 with a page). Number 337 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: West Daly · 2017West Daly · 2022West Daly · 2026West Daly · 2022

Burnt area
11,365ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
11days
13 Oct 2019 – 23 Oct 2019
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
13 Oct
2019
Heat detections
416
in a single hotspot: 200 MW
Danger at start
22
High · FWI index
Average daily power
510MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 13 Oct23 Oct
23 Oct 2019

How it evolved, day by day

13 Oct 2019 · 51 MW · 5 14 Oct 2019 · 338 MW · 17 16 Oct 2019 · 10 MW · 2 17 Oct 2019 · 65 MW · 11 18 Oct 2019 · 285 MW · 23 19 Oct 2019 · 1,044 MW · 53 20 Oct 2019 · 312 MW · 45 21 Oct 2019 · 1,654 MW · 66 22 Oct 2019 · 677 MW · 110 23 Oct 2019 · 660 MW · 84
13 Oct 16 Oct 18 Oct 20 Oct 21 Oct 22 Oct

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

The weather it burned in

42°high
46km/h · peak gust
12%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 4.6 mm on 30 Oct.

This area had burned before

68% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 5,502 ha in 2016, 1,825 ha in 2017, 4,771 ha in 2018. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 7,711 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 7.2% of the area of London (114 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
    11,414 ha reached on 13 Oct
    0.8 %

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)
7 Oct 32.5 °C 52 % 37 km/h 1.0 mm High 22
8 Oct 33.4 °C 44 % 38 km/h 0.8 mm High 26
9 Oct 37.8 °C 23 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
10 Oct 38.3 °C 19 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
11 Oct 37.5 °C 27 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
12 Oct 36.2 °C 32 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
13 Oct 37.7 °C 25 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
14 Oct 36.6 °C 30 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
15 Oct 36.1 °C 29 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
16 Oct 35.7 °C 34 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
17 Oct 37.9 °C 28 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
18 Oct 38.0 °C 27 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
19 Oct 40.1 °C 18 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
20 Oct 41.5 °C 14 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
21 Oct 40.7 °C 12 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
22 Oct 38.3 °C 17 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
23 Oct 37.1 °C 28 % 41 km/h 0.2 mm Very high 50
24 Oct after 34.3 °C 42 % 35 km/h 3.1 mm Moderate 13
25 Oct after 32.6 °C 53 % 36 km/h 3.1 mm Low 8
26 Oct after 34.6 °C 44 % 33 km/h 3.6 mm Low 8
27 Oct after 30.6 °C 62 % 25 km/h 7.8 mm Very low 1
28 Oct after 34.1 °C 40 % 36 km/h 4.5 mm Very low 4
29 Oct after 34.9 °C 31 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
30 Oct after 33.9 °C 45 % 33 km/h 4.6 mm Very low 4

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 6 Oct 2019
After · 30 Oct 2019

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 · 416Every 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 13 October 2019 and 23 October 2019: 11 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 11,365 hectares (113.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered West Daly (11,414 ha, 0.8 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 41.5 °C, humidity dropped to 12 % and gusts hit 46 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 59, 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. 416 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.