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Wiluna fire, 11 October 2018 Wiluna

Out · last detection 22 Oct 2018, 17:31 UTC

The fire started on 11 October 2018 in Wiluna, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 13 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 16,118 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 512th largest in Western Australia since 2016 (of 2728 with a page). Number 193 in Australia in 2018, of 923.

Compare with…
Burnt area
16,118ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
13days
11 Oct 2018 – 23 Oct 2018
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
11 Oct
2018
Heat detections
512
in a single hotspot: 241 MW
Danger at start
69
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
893MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 11 Oct23 Oct
22 Oct 2018

How it evolved, day by day

11 Oct 2018 · 1,364 MW · 29 12 Oct 2018 · 1,422 MW · 54 14 Oct 2018 · 80 MW · 19 15 Oct 2018 · 395 MW · 14 16 Oct 2018 · 2,731 MW · 93 17 Oct 2018 · 713 MW · 58 18 Oct 2018 · 2,029 MW · 166 19 Oct 2018 · 159 MW · 28 20 Oct 2018 · 52 MW · 11 21 Oct 2018 · 873 MW · 37 22 Oct 2018 · 9 MW · 3
11 Oct 14 Oct 16 Oct 18 Oct 20 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

38°high
72km/h · peak gust
6%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 10% of the area of London (161 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. Wiluna where it started
    16,250 ha reached on 11 Oct
    0.1 %

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)
11 Oct 34.5 °C 13 % 57 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 69
12 Oct 34.8 °C 11 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 64
13 Oct 35.0 °C 12 % 58 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 77
14 Oct 31.7 °C 16 % 72 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 91
15 Oct 27.3 °C 16 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
16 Oct 28.7 °C 15 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
17 Oct 32.3 °C 7 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
18 Oct 37.5 °C 6 % 63 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 96
19 Oct 27.1 °C 12 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 72
20 Oct 31.3 °C 11 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
21 Oct 36.9 °C 6 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 66
22 Oct 34.6 °C 9 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 75
23 Oct 34.4 °C 10 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 74
24 Oct after 39.4 °C 5 % 59 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 97
25 Oct after 32.7 °C 8 % 79 km/h 0.1 mm Very extreme 111
26 Oct after 31.6 °C 17 % 76 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 101
27 Oct after 31.3 °C 17 % 55 km/h 0.1 mm Very extreme 80
28 Oct after 29.8 °C 29 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
29 Oct after 33.8 °C 20 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
30 Oct after 37.5 °C 13 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
31 Oct after 39.8 °C 9 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 70
1 Nov after 40.4 °C 11 % 50 km/h 0.3 mm Very extreme 83
2 Nov after 39.6 °C 15 % 32 km/h 0.7 mm Extreme 62

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 4 Oct 2018
After · 30 Oct 2018

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 · 512Every 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

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Wiluna fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 11 October 2018 and 23 October 2018: 13 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 16,118 hectares (161.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Wiluna (16,250 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 37.5 °C, humidity dropped to 6 % and gusts hit 72 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 96, class Very 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. 512 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.