How long did the Carnarvon fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 30 September 2022 to 15 October 2022 (16 days). The perimeter dates it from 30 September 2022 to 9 October 2022.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 14,001 hectares (140.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Carnarvon (14,192 ha, 0.3 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 33.4 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 60 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 62, class 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.

AU · Australia · 2022-09-30 → 2022-10-15

Carnarvon fire, September 2022 Carnarvon

Out · last detection 15 Oct 2022, 06:55 UTC

The fire started on 30 September 2022 in Carnarvon, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 16 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 14,001 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 624th largest in Western Australia since 2016 (of 2728 with a page). Number 120 in Australia in 2022, of 566.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Carnarvon · 2022 Carnarvon · 2022 Upper Gascoyne · 2022 Carnarvon · 2022

Burnt area: 14,001ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 16days; 30 Sept 2022 – 15 Oct 2022
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 30 Sept; 2022
Heat detections: 589; in a single hotspot: 102 MW
Danger at start: 52; Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power: 368MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 30 Sept15 Oct

Play back 15 Oct 2022

How it evolved, day by day

30 Sept 2 Oct 4 Oct 6 Oct 8 Oct 12 Oct 14 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

33°high

60km/h · peak gust

9%lowest humidity

It had gone 16 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?

It burned the equivalent of 8.8% of the area of London (140 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

Carnarvon where it started

14,192 ha reached on 30 Sept

0.3 %

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)
30 Sept	28.0 °C	31 %	60 km/h	0.2 mm	Extreme 52
1 Oct	29.0 °C	25 %	52 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
2 Oct	29.0 °C	19 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
3 Oct	27.6 °C	19 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
4 Oct	29.1 °C	18 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
5 Oct	27.5 °C	30 %	55 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 53
6 Oct	25.4 °C	14 %	50 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
7 Oct	27.5 °C	10 %	53 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 62
8 Oct	33.4 °C	11 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
9 Oct	31.6 °C	13 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 61
10 Oct	25.7 °C	33 %	42 km/h	0.2 mm	Very high 45
11 Oct	23.5 °C	18 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
12 Oct	25.4 °C	16 %	52 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 55
13 Oct	27.6 °C	9 %	49 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 60
14 Oct	30.9 °C	11 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 58
15 Oct	31.7 °C	13 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 59
16 Oct after	26.6 °C	29 %	53 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 56
17 Oct after	27.3 °C	24 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 50
18 Oct after	31.5 °C	10 %	51 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 62
19 Oct after	34.3 °C	14 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 64
20 Oct after	30.5 °C	27 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 52
21 Oct after	31.3 °C	24 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 53
22 Oct after	32.0 °C	22 %	50 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 60
23 Oct after	31.3 °C	27 %	58 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 65
24 Oct after	27.6 °C	24 %	53 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 62
25 Oct after	28.5 °C	19 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 23 Sept 2022

After · 22 Oct 2022

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 5 October 2022 the air beside the fire reached 12 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak12 µg/m³

Days over the guideline0 days

PM1026 µg/m³

Optical depth0.18

282930123456789101112

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 · 589Every 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

All fires in Australia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Carnarvon fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 30 September 2022 to 15 October 2022 (16 days). The perimeter dates it from 30 September 2022 to 9 October 2022.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 14,001 hectares (140.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Carnarvon (14,192 ha, 0.3 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 33.4 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 60 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 62, class 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

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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 30 September 2022 to 9 October 2022. 589 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.

Where it burned