Bundaberg fire, October 2025 Bundaberg
The fire started on 1 October 2025 in Bundaberg, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 13 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,876 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 1436th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 926 in Australia in 2025, of 1124.
The power measured by the satellite is low (23.6 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 5,876ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 13days
- 1 Oct 2025 – 13 Oct 2025
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- local government areas
- Started on
- 1 Oct
- 2025
- Heat detections
- 256
- in a single hotspot: 24 MW
- Danger at start
- 24
- High · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 90MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
It had gone 8 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.
This area had burned before
89% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 618 ha in 2016, 169 ha in 2017, 4,880 ha in 2018, 2,476 ha in 2021, 52 ha in 2023. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 5,207 ha that had burned before.
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
Bundaberg where it started5,898 ha reached on 1 Oct0.9 %
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.
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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Oct | 29.9 °C | 38 % | 23 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 24 |
| 2 Oct | 32.7 °C | 26 % | 41 km/h | 0.2 mm | High 29 |
| 3 Oct | 27.3 °C | 16 % | 42 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 34 |
| 4 Oct | 27.3 °C | 21 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 36 |
| 5 Oct | 26.2 °C | 34 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 28 |
| 6 Oct | 28.9 °C | 23 % | 28 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 30 |
| 7 Oct | 30.3 °C | 28 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 31 |
| 8 Oct | 28.4 °C | 36 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 30 |
| 9 Oct | 29.0 °C | 38 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 29 |
| 10 Oct | 29.2 °C | 39 % | 33 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 28 |
| 11 Oct | 30.3 °C | 41 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 28 |
| 12 Oct | 30.9 °C | 44 % | 36 km/h | 0.9 mm | Moderate 20 |
| 13 Oct | 28.1 °C | 51 % | 26 km/h | 0.5 mm | Moderate 17 |
| 14 Oct after | 29.2 °C | 43 % | 32 km/h | 0.7 mm | Moderate 21 |
| 15 Oct after | 28.2 °C | 44 % | 40 km/h | 0.2 mm | High 23 |
| 16 Oct after | 26.3 °C | 37 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 25 |
| 17 Oct after | 28.2 °C | 34 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 28 |
| 18 Oct after | 30.6 °C | 33 % | 28 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 28 |
| 19 Oct after | 29.7 °C | 38 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 29 |
| 20 Oct after | 30.1 °C | 33 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 30 |
| 21 Oct after | 30.8 °C | 27 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 33 |
| 22 Oct after | 30.4 °C | 36 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 32 |
| 23 Oct after | 33.9 °C | 33 % | 28 km/h | 0.1 mm | High 32 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
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 · CopernicusOn 2 October 2025 the air beside the fire reached 31 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).
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 · 256Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 8,937 haNorth BurnettJanuary 2019 · 19 days · 23 km away
- 7,958 haGladstone28 November 2016 · 11 days · 24 km away
- 16,614 haNorth Burnett25 September 2025 · 27 days · 27 km away
- 9,663 haNorth Burnett6 October 2016 · 17 days · 33 km away
- 8,404 haGladstoneNovember 2019 · 31 days · 36 km away
- 18,565 haNorth BurnettNovember 2023 · 16 days · 40 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Bundaberg fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 1 October 2025 and 13 October 2025: 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 5,876 hectares (58.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Bundaberg (5,898 ha, 0.9 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 32.7 °C, humidity dropped to 16 % and gusts hit 42 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 36, 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.
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
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. 256 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.
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.