How long did the West Daly fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 23 October 2022 to 3 November 2022 (12 days). The perimeter dates it from 24 October 2022 to 3 November 2022.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,126 hectares (61.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered West Daly (6,164 ha, 0.4 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 41.0 °C, humidity dropped to 19 % and gusts hit 43 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 36, class High.

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 · 2022-10-23 → 2022-11-03

West Daly fire, 23 October 2022 West Daly

Out · last detection 2 Nov 2022, 17:28 UTC

The fire started on 23 October 2022 in West Daly, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,126 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 2701th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3511 with a page). Number 416 in Australia in 2022, of 566.

Compare with…

Suggestions: West Daly · 2020 West Daly · 2018 West Daly · 2026 West Daly · 2021

Burnt area: 6,126ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 12days; 23 Oct 2022 – 3 Nov 2022
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 23 Oct; 2022
Heat detections: 231; in a single hotspot: 79 MW
Danger at start: 19; Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power: 170MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 23 Oct3 Nov

Play back 2 Nov 2022

How it evolved, day by day

23 Oct 25 Oct 27 Oct 29 Oct 31 Oct 1 Nov 2 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

41°high

43km/h · peak gust

19%lowest humidity

It had gone 2 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 11.9 mm on 11 Nov.

This area had burned before

100% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 4,087 ha in 2016, 23 ha in 2017, 269 ha in 2018, 6,744 ha in 2019, 5,263 ha in 2020, 3,480 ha in 2021. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 6,140 ha that had burned before.

2,515 ha West Daly fire, August 2020 6,464 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 3.9% of the area of London (61 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

6,164 ha reached on 23 Oct

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 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)
23 Oct	38.0 °C	36 %	32 km/h	0.3 mm	Moderate 19
24 Oct	36.2 °C	50 %	35 km/h	0.1 mm	Moderate 15
25 Oct	37.5 °C	40 %	35 km/h	0.2 mm	Moderate 16
26 Oct	38.2 °C	39 %	26 km/h	0.4 mm	Moderate 17
27 Oct	38.6 °C	33 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
28 Oct	37.6 °C	37 %	31 km/h	0.2 mm	Moderate 21
29 Oct	37.7 °C	36 %	43 km/h	0.4 mm	High 24
30 Oct	37.0 °C	36 %	34 km/h	0.2 mm	High 23
31 Oct	38.4 °C	29 %	38 km/h	0.1 mm	High 27
1 Nov	38.9 °C	30 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
2 Nov	41.0 °C	19 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
3 Nov	38.5 °C	29 %	29 km/h	0.2 mm	High 32
4 Nov after	36.4 °C	27 %	31 km/h	1.1 mm	High 24
5 Nov after	37.5 °C	36 %	27 km/h	2.0 mm	Moderate 14
6 Nov after	38.3 °C	29 %	35 km/h	0.8 mm	High 25
7 Nov after	36.4 °C	39 %	30 km/h	3.7 mm	Low 8
8 Nov after	39.2 °C	30 %	31 km/h	0.1 mm	High 24
9 Nov after	37.4 °C	34 %	37 km/h	0.7 mm	High 22
10 Nov after	36.3 °C	39 %	26 km/h	0.7 mm	Moderate 19
11 Nov after	36.1 °C	46 %	31 km/h	11.9 mm	Very low 3

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 16 Oct 2022

After · 10 Nov 2022

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.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 1 November 2022 the air beside the fire reached 14 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak14 µg/m³

Days over the guideline0 days

PM1022 µg/m³

Optical depth0.40

22232425262728293031123456

Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

Particles from the Copernicus CAMS model at the centre of the perimeter; these are not measurements in each town. The pale bar is the worst hour, the solid one the daily average.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)

Detections table · 231Every 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 23 October 2022 to 3 November 2022 (12 days). The perimeter dates it from 24 October 2022 to 3 November 2022.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,126 hectares (61.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered West Daly (6,164 ha, 0.4 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 41.0 °C, humidity dropped to 19 % and gusts hit 43 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 36, class High.
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.

26 October 2026 Start date: 24 October 2022 → 23 October 2022.

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 24 October 2022 to 3 November 2022. 231 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