How long did the Boulia fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 8 January 2026 and 13 January 2026: 6 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 10,178 hectares (101.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Boulia (10,228 ha, 0.2 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 44.4 °C, humidity dropped to 2 % and gusts hit 51 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 48, 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.

AU · Australia · 2026-01-08 → 2026-01-13

Boulia fire, January 2026 Boulia

Out · last detection 13 Jan 2026, 04:42 UTC

The fire started on 8 January 2026 in Boulia, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 10,178 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 751th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1743 with a page). Number 348 in Australia in 2026, of 891.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Boulia · 2023

Burnt area: 10,178ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 6days; 8 Jan 2026 – 13 Jan 2026
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 8 Jan; 2026
Heat detections: 304; in a single hotspot: 123 MW
Danger at start: 24; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 468MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 8 Jan13 Jan

Play back 13 Jan 2026

How it evolved, day by day

8 Jan 9 Jan 10 Jan 11 Jan 12 Jan 13 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

44°high

51km/h · peak gust

2%lowest humidity

It had gone 4 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

0% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 40 ha in 2025.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 6.4% of the area of London (102 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

Boulia where it started

10,228 ha reached on 8 Jan

0.2 %

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)
8 Jan	37.8 °C	25 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	High 24
9 Jan	38.1 °C	26 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
10 Jan	39.8 °C	15 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
11 Jan	41.9 °C	13 %	50 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
12 Jan	41.9 °C	11 %	49 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
13 Jan	41.5 °C	14 %	51 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
14 Jan after	34.7 °C	54 %	42 km/h	8.0 mm	Very low 5
15 Jan after	28.1 °C	83 %	35 km/h	24.5 mm	Very low 0
16 Jan after	35.2 °C	44 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Very low 3
17 Jan after	37.8 °C	27 %	25 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 13
18 Jan after	39.2 °C	12 %	19 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 21
19 Jan after	41.7 °C	2 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
20 Jan after	44.4 °C	3 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
21 Jan after	40.7 °C	7 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 46
22 Jan after	40.4 °C	16 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
23 Jan after	39.9 °C	25 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
24 Jan after	39.5 °C	27 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
25 Jan after	39.8 °C	20 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
26 Jan after	39.8 °C	24 %	49 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
27 Jan after	38.3 °C	25 %	59 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 52
28 Jan after	37.0 °C	32 %	53 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
29 Jan after	39.4 °C	22 %	51 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
30 Jan after	40.1 °C	24 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 1 Jan 2026

After · 20 Jan 2026

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 13 January 2026 the air beside the fire reached 17 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak17 µg/m³

Days over the guideline0 days

PM1031 µg/m³

Optical depth0.25

WHO 15

678910111213141516

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 · 304Every 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

5,613 haBoulia4 December 2023 · 4 days · 14 km away

All fires in Australia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Boulia fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 8 January 2026 and 13 January 2026: 6 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 10,178 hectares (101.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Boulia (10,228 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 44.4 °C, humidity dropped to 2 % and gusts hit 51 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 48, 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

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

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.

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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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 304 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.

Where it burned