Skip to content
worldfires
en
AU · Australia · →

Banana fire, 23 December 2018 Banana, Central Highlands (Qld)

Out · last detection 6 Jan 2019, 15:25 UTC

The fire started on 23 December 2018 in Banana, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 15 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 11,923 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 626th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 301 in Australia in 2018, of 923.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Banana · 2019Banana · 2023Banana · 2026Banana · 2017

Burnt area
11,923ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
15days
23 Dec 2018 – 6 Jan 2019
Municipalities hit
2
local government areas
Started on
23 Dec
2018
Heat detections
1,018
in a single hotspot: 123 MW
Danger at start
18
Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power
651MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 23 Dec6 Jan
6 Jan 2019

How it evolved, day by day

23 Dec 2018 · 2 MW · 1 24 Dec 2018 · 1,664 MW · 77 25 Dec 2018 · 769 MW · 109 26 Dec 2018 · 1,076 MW · 69 27 Dec 2018 · 956 MW · 105 28 Dec 2018 · 395 MW · 58 29 Dec 2018 · 339 MW · 48 30 Dec 2018 · 516 MW · 79 31 Dec 2018 · 507 MW · 71 1 Jan 2019 · 426 MW · 59 2 Jan 2019 · 391 MW · 60 3 Jan 2019 · 779 MW · 43 4 Jan 2019 · 604 MW · 77 5 Jan 2019 · 362 MW · 48 6 Jan 2019 · 976 MW · 114
23 Dec 24 Dec 26 Dec 29 Dec 1 Jan 4 Jan

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

The weather it burned in

36°high
46km/h · peak gust
13%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 7.5% of the area of London (119 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. Banana where it started
    11,220 ha reached on 23 Dec
    0.4 %
  2. Central Highlands (Qld)
    788 ha reached on 25 Dec
    0.0 %

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 Dec 31.5 °C 24 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
24 Dec 30.1 °C 25 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
25 Dec 30.6 °C 21 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
26 Dec 32.0 °C 18 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
27 Dec 31.7 °C 25 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
28 Dec 31.9 °C 28 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
29 Dec 33.4 °C 25 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
30 Dec 33.2 °C 23 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
31 Dec 32.9 °C 22 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
1 Jan 33.8 °C 19 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
2 Jan 33.1 °C 25 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
3 Jan 33.1 °C 29 % 38 km/h 0.2 mm High 27
4 Jan 33.8 °C 24 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
5 Jan 34.1 °C 19 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
6 Jan 35.8 °C 13 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
7 Jan after 32.6 °C 24 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
8 Jan after 24.2 °C 53 % 38 km/h 9.6 mm Very low 2
9 Jan after 25.5 °C 77 % 24 km/h 43.9 mm Very low 0
10 Jan after 28.4 °C 51 % 30 km/h 7.0 mm Very low 0
11 Jan after 30.8 °C 37 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very low 4
12 Jan after 33.0 °C 22 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 12
13 Jan after 32.8 °C 29 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 13
14 Jan after 31.3 °C 32 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 15
15 Jan after 33.2 °C 28 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
16 Jan after 34.3 °C 33 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 17
17 Jan after 32.8 °C 27 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
18 Jan after 31.7 °C 29 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
19 Jan after 33.1 °C 27 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
20 Jan after 34.5 °C 23 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
21 Jan after 33.4 °C 29 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
22 Jan after 33.0 °C 30 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
23 Jan after 33.7 °C 30 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 23

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 16 Dec 2018
After · 13 Jan 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 · 1,018Every 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 Banana fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 23 December 2018 and 6 January 2019: 15 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 11,923 hectares (119.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Banana (11,220 ha, 0.4 %); Central Highlands (Qld) (788 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 35.8 °C, humidity dropped to 13 % and gusts hit 46 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 34, 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

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. 1,018 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.