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Carpentaria fire, 30 October 2022 Carpentaria, Cook

Out · last detection 6 Nov 2022, 03:24 UTC

The fire started on 30 October 2022 in Carpentaria, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 7 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 26,683 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 213th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1744 with a page). Number 35 in Australia in 2022, of 566.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Carpentaria · 2017Carpentaria · 2019Carpentaria · 2025Carpentaria · 2016

Burnt area
26,683ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
7days
30 Oct 2022 – 5 Nov 2022
Municipalities hit
2
local government areas
Started on
30 Oct
2022
Heat detections
868
in a single hotspot: 97 MW
Danger at start
39
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
759MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 30 Oct5 Nov
6 Nov 2022

How it evolved, day by day

30 Oct 2022 · 263 MW · 29 31 Oct 2022 · 1,788 MW · 256 1 Nov 2022 · 1,629 MW · 131 2 Nov 2022 · 693 MW · 206 3 Nov 2022 · 1,145 MW · 171 4 Nov 2022 · 341 MW · 46 5 Nov 2022 · 200 MW · 27 6 Nov 2022 · 16 MW · 2
30 Oct 31 Oct 1 Nov 3 Nov 5 Nov

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

The weather it burned in

42°high
44km/h · peak gust
13%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 16.1 mm on 15 Nov.

This area had burned before

58% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 3,335 ha in 2016, 7,529 ha in 2017, 45 ha in 2018, 7,849 ha in 2019, 625 ha in 2020, 553 ha in 2021. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 15,345 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 17% of the area of London (267 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. Carpentaria where it started
    21,161 ha reached on 30 Oct
    0.3 %
  2. Cook
    5,567 ha reached on 31 Oct
    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 area0.18 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.18 hectares of 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)
29 Oct 41.9 °C 23 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
30 Oct 40.3 °C 28 % 31 km/h 1.4 mm High 35
31 Oct 40.0 °C 27 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
1 Nov 39.3 °C 33 % 44 km/h 0.2 mm Very high 48
2 Nov 39.6 °C 19 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
3 Nov 38.3 °C 20 % 27 km/h 0.1 mm Very high 45
4 Nov 39.6 °C 13 % 42 km/h 0.2 mm Extreme 59
5 Nov 37.0 °C 26 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
6 Nov after 36.2 °C 31 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
7 Nov after 38.3 °C 24 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
8 Nov after 38.7 °C 25 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
9 Nov after 39.2 °C 23 % 37 km/h 0.1 mm Very high 50
10 Nov after 38.4 °C 25 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
11 Nov after 38.0 °C 24 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
12 Nov after 38.3 °C 29 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
13 Nov after 39.2 °C 25 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
14 Nov after 39.4 °C 30 % 32 km/h 0.3 mm Very high 45
15 Nov after 37.1 °C 40 % 27 km/h 16.1 mm Low 7

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 23 Oct 2022
After · 12 Nov 2022

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 31 October 2022 the air beside the fire reached 99 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 42: 2.8 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak99 µg/m³
Days over the guideline7 days
PM10330 µg/m³
Optical depth1.10
2829303112345678
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 · 868Every 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 Carpentaria fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 30 October 2022 and 5 November 2022: 7 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 26,683 hectares (266.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Carpentaria (21,161 ha, 0.3 %); Cook (5,567 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 41.9 °C, humidity dropped to 13 % and gusts hit 44 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 59, 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

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
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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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 868 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.