How long did the Central Desert fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 18 May 2023 and 27 May 2023: 10 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 9,517 hectares (95.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Central Desert (9,442 ha, 0.0 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 29.0 °C, humidity dropped to 12 % and gusts hit 59 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 71, 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 · 2023-05-18 → 2023-05-27

Central Desert fire, 18 May 2023 Central Desert

Out · last detection 28 May 2023, 04:58 UTC

The fire started on 18 May 2023 in Central Desert, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 10 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 9,517 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1560th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3503 with a page). Number 595 in Australia in 2023, of 1235.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Central Desert · 2023 Central Desert · 2023 Central Desert · 2023 Central Desert · 2023

Burnt area: 9,517ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 10days; 18 May 2023 – 27 May 2023
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 18 May; 2023
Heat detections: 310; in a single hotspot: 162 MW
Danger at start: 58; Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power: 269MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 18 May27 May

Play back 28 May 2023

How it evolved, day by day

18 May 19 May 20 May 23 May 25 May 27 May

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

The weather it burned in

29°high

59km/h · peak gust

12%lowest humidity

It had gone 32 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

2% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 181 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 6% of the area of London (95 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

9,442 ha reached on 18 May

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 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	Danger (FWI)
18 May	26.3 °C	20 %	48 km/h	Extreme 58
19 May	25.0 °C	20 %	47 km/h	Extreme 57
20 May	22.8 °C	18 %	49 km/h	Extreme 61
21 May	23.3 °C	18 %	59 km/h	Very extreme 71
22 May	24.9 °C	16 %	52 km/h	Extreme 64
23 May	26.5 °C	14 %	50 km/h	Extreme 60
24 May	28.2 °C	12 %	43 km/h	Extreme 57
25 May	29.0 °C	19 %	37 km/h	Extreme 51
26 May	27.5 °C	22 %	55 km/h	Extreme 66
27 May	22.5 °C	19 %	48 km/h	Extreme 58
28 May after	22.0 °C	19 %	45 km/h	Extreme 56
29 May after	24.3 °C	17 %	48 km/h	Extreme 59
30 May after	25.5 °C	16 %	47 km/h	Extreme 56
31 May after	27.8 °C	14 %	34 km/h	Very high 46
1 Jun after	28.9 °C	17 %	33 km/h	Very high 45
2 Jun after	29.7 °C	25 %	24 km/h	Very high 39
3 Jun after	30.3 °C	26 %	38 km/h	Very high 48
4 Jun after	31.0 °C	26 %	36 km/h	Very high 49
5 Jun after	30.9 °C	27 %	31 km/h	Very high 42
6 Jun after	31.1 °C	30 %	41 km/h	Very high 46
7 Jun after	33.0 °C	25 %	27 km/h	Very high 41
8 Jun after	31.1 °C	31 %	39 km/h	Very high 48

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 11 May 2023

After · 3 Jun 2023

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 30 May 2023 the air beside the fire reached 75 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 34: 2.2 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak75 µg/m³

Days over the guideline2 days

PM10110 µg/m³

Optical depth0.23

WHO 15

161718192021222324252627282930

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 · 310Every 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 18 May 2023 and 27 May 2023: 10 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 9,517 hectares (95.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Central Desert (9,442 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 29.0 °C, humidity dropped to 12 % and gusts hit 59 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 71, 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.

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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. 310 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