Skip to content
worldfires
en
AU · Australia · →

Barkly fire, 21 September 2023 Barkly, Mount Isa

Out · last detection 8 Oct 2023, 16:14 UTC

The fire started on 21 September 2023 in Barkly, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 18 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 34,429 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 301th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3514 with a page). Number 146 in Australia in 2023, of 1235.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Barkly · 2018Barkly · 2018Barkly · 2023Barkly · 2025

Burnt area
34,429ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
18days
21 Sept 2023 – 8 Oct 2023
Municipalities hit
2
local government areas
Started on
21 Sept
2023
Heat detections
1,765
in a single hotspot: 223 MW
Danger at start
79
Very extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
978MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 21 Sept8 Oct
8 Oct 2023

How it evolved, day by day

21 Sept 2023 · 1,385 MW · 131 22 Sept 2023 · 3,915 MW · 362 23 Sept 2023 · 1,717 MW · 209 24 Sept 2023 · 736 MW · 59 25 Sept 2023 · 868 MW · 85 26 Sept 2023 · 483 MW · 57 27 Sept 2023 · 1,286 MW · 170 28 Sept 2023 · 2,705 MW · 170 29 Sept 2023 · 224 MW · 29 30 Sept 2023 · 386 MW · 51 1 Oct 2023 · 518 MW · 48 2 Oct 2023 · 842 MW · 73 3 Oct 2023 · 621 MW · 42 4 Oct 2023 · 54 MW · 12 5 Oct 2023 · 120 MW · 39 6 Oct 2023 · 1,220 MW · 129 7 Oct 2023 · 413 MW · 70 8 Oct 2023 · 102 MW · 29
21 Sept 22 Sept 24 Sept 27 Sept 30 Sept 3 Oct 6 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
55km/h · peak gust
9%lowest humidity

It had gone 55 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.0 mm on 10 Oct.

This area had burned before

45% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 916 ha in 2016, 15,045 ha in 2018, 196 ha in 2019.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 22% of the area of London (344 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. Barkly where it started
    30,817 ha reached on 21 Sept
    0.1 %
  2. Mount Isa
    3,577 ha reached on 22 Sept
    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 2025
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2025, 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. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.

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)
21 Sept 37.9 °C 9 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 79
22 Sept 36.3 °C 10 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 79
23 Sept 35.4 °C 9 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 77
24 Sept 34.1 °C 15 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 68
25 Sept 34.8 °C 14 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
26 Sept 35.2 °C 12 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 66
27 Sept 34.7 °C 13 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 70
28 Sept 34.5 °C 14 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 83
29 Sept 34.5 °C 13 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 71
30 Sept 34.1 °C 21 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 72
1 Oct 36.3 °C 12 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
2 Oct 36.7 °C 13 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 66
3 Oct 36.3 °C 20 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
4 Oct 34.4 °C 22 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 67
5 Oct 31.7 °C 14 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 74
6 Oct 32.9 °C 9 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 75
7 Oct 34.4 °C 10 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 77
8 Oct 35.2 °C 15 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 75
9 Oct after 32.8 °C 29 % 40 km/h 0.3 mm Extreme 51
10 Oct after 31.7 °C 35 % 24 km/h 1.0 mm High 29

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 14 Sept 2023
After · 15 Oct 2023

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 26 September 2023 the air beside the fire reached 71 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 32: 2.2 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak71 µg/m³
Days over the guideline6 days
PM10102 µg/m³
Optical depth1.05
1920212223242526272829301234567891011
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 · 1,765Every 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 Barkly fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 21 September 2023 and 8 October 2023: 18 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 34,429 hectares (344.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Barkly (30,817 ha, 0.1 %); Mount Isa (3,577 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 37.9 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 55 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 83, 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. 1,765 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 2025, 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.