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Aurukun fire, 15 September 2017 Aurukun

Out · last detection 22 Sept 2017, 15:53 UTC

The fire started on 15 September 2017 in Aurukun, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 8 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,165 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1665th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 821 in Australia in 2017, of 862.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Cook · 2016Aurukun · 2023Aurukun · 2026Aurukun · 2022

Burnt area
5,165ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
8days
15 Sept 2017 – 22 Sept 2017
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
15 Sept
2017
Heat detections
169
in a single hotspot: 41 MW
Danger at start
44
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
254MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 15 Sept22 Sept
22 Sept 2017

How it evolved, day by day

15 Sept 2017 · 69 MW · 32 16 Sept 2017 · 959 MW · 77 17 Sept 2017 · 394 MW · 40 18 Sept 2017 · 41 MW · 9 21 Sept 2017 · 35 MW · 6 22 Sept 2017 · 25 MW · 5
15 Sept 16 Sept 17 Sept 18 Sept 21 Sept 22 Sept

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

The weather it burned in

35°high
56km/h · peak gust
27%lowest humidity

It had gone 39 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.0 mm on 1 Oct.

This area had burned before

9% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 583 ha in 2016. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 490 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 3.3% of the area of London (52 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. Aurukun where it started
    5,194 ha reached on 15 Sept
    0.7 %

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 Rain Danger (FWI)
15 Sept 33.6 °C 30 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
16 Sept 34.2 °C 27 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
17 Sept 32.9 °C 32 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
18 Sept 31.7 °C 46 % 50 km/h 0.2 mm High 38
19 Sept 30.8 °C 54 % 56 km/h 0.5 mm High 32
20 Sept 33.4 °C 36 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
21 Sept 35.4 °C 29 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
22 Sept 35.4 °C 29 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
23 Sept after 36.4 °C 20 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
24 Sept after 35.9 °C 23 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
25 Sept after 36.0 °C 26 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
26 Sept after 36.7 °C 26 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
27 Sept after 36.3 °C 30 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
28 Sept after 35.4 °C 31 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
29 Sept after 36.0 °C 20 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
30 Sept after 34.3 °C 40 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
1 Oct after 34.7 °C 40 % 31 km/h 1.0 mm High 23

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 8 Sept 2017
After · 29 Sept 2017

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 · 169Every 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 Aurukun fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 15 September 2017 and 22 September 2017: 8 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 5,165 hectares (51.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Aurukun (5,194 ha, 0.7 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 35.4 °C, humidity dropped to 27 % and gusts hit 56 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 44, class Very 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

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. 169 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.