How long did the Central Desert fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 21 September 2017 and 29 September 2017: 9 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 105,127 hectares (1,051.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Central Desert (104,748 ha, 0.4 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 40.2 °C, humidity dropped to 6 % and gusts hit 46 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 73, 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.

AU · Australia · 2017-09-21 → 2017-09-29

Central Desert fire, 21 September 2017 Central Desert

Out · last detection 30 Sept 2017, 05:34 UTC

The fire started on 21 September 2017 in Central Desert, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 105,127 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

This page is probably a fire complex, not a single fire. GWIS merges into one perimeter the fires that touch over weeks, which in large burning seasons can join dozens of separate fires. The total area is reliable; the origin and dates refer to the whole complex.

Other fire pages in the same area and on the same dates:

It is the 51th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3511 with a page). Number 11 in Australia in 2017, of 862.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Central Desert · 2023 Central Desert · 2023

Burnt area: 105,127ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 9days; 21 Sept 2017 – 29 Sept 2017
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 21 Sept; 2017
Heat detections: 3,946; in a single hotspot: 368 MW
Danger at start: 61; Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power: 8.0GW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 21 Sept29 Sept

Play back 30 Sept 2017

How it evolved, day by day

21 Sept 23 Sept 24 Sept 25 Sept 27 Sept 29 Sept

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

The weather it burned in

40°high

46km/h · peak gust

6%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months 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 66% of the area of London (1,051 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

Central Desert where it started

104,748 ha reached on 21 Sept

0.4 %

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 2015

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2015, 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)
19 Sept	34.4 °C	6 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 61
20 Sept	33.9 °C	8 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 68
21 Sept	35.7 °C	8 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 58
22 Sept	37.1 °C	9 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 61
23 Sept	37.0 °C	11 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 65
24 Sept	36.4 °C	11 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 60
25 Sept	36.0 °C	12 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Very extreme 73
26 Sept	38.1 °C	11 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
27 Sept	37.9 °C	15 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
28 Sept	37.0 °C	20 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 61
29 Sept	40.2 °C	13 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 67
30 Sept after	36.7 °C	18 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 67
1 Oct after	32.2 °C	27 %	49 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
2 Oct after	32.4 °C	22 %	52 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 59
3 Oct after	34.4 °C	18 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 53
4 Oct after	34.9 °C	13 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
5 Oct after	37.6 °C	11 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 58
6 Oct after	38.0 °C	11 %	49 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
7 Oct after	31.8 °C	23 %	37 km/h	0.1 mm	Extreme 51
8 Oct after	34.3 °C	31 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
9 Oct after	32.5 °C	36 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
10 Oct after	35.5 °C	28 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 14 Sept 2017

After · 6 Oct 2017

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.

Detections table · 3,946Every 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 Central Desert fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 21 September 2017 and 29 September 2017: 9 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 105,127 hectares (1,051.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Central Desert (104,748 ha, 0.4 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 40.2 °C, humidity dropped to 6 % and gusts hit 46 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 73, 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

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.

Report an error

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?

Your connection to the fire (optional) Email (optional)

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. 3,946 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 2015, 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