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Central Desert fire, 4 October 2023 Central Desert

Out · last detection 9 Oct 2023, 04:44 UTC

The fire started on 4 October 2023 in Central Desert, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 11,996 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1183th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3521 with a page). Number 461 in Australia in 2023, of 1235.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Central Desert · 2025Central Desert · 2023Central Desert · 2023Central Desert · 2024

Burnt area
11,996ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
6days
4 Oct 2023 – 9 Oct 2023
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
4 Oct
2023
Heat detections
665
in a single hotspot: 139 MW
Danger at start
89
Very extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
1.4GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 4 Oct9 Oct
9 Oct 2023

How it evolved, day by day

4 Oct 2023 · 3,236 MW · 216 5 Oct 2023 · 1,870 MW · 180 6 Oct 2023 · 1,177 MW · 141 7 Oct 2023 · 1,965 MW · 103 8 Oct 2023 · 224 MW · 24 9 Oct 2023 · 4 MW · 1
4 Oct 5 Oct 6 Oct 7 Oct 8 Oct 9 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

32°high
60km/h · peak gust
10%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

1% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 125 ha in 2019.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 7.6% of the area of London (120 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. Central Desert where it started
    12,045 ha reached on 4 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 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 Rain Danger (FWI)
4 Oct 31.6 °C 11 % 60 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 89
5 Oct 30.5 °C 10 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 81
6 Oct 30.2 °C 11 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 84
7 Oct 29.7 °C 10 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 77
8 Oct 31.0 °C 13 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 77
9 Oct 32.0 °C 11 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 70
10 Oct after 32.7 °C 8 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 78
11 Oct after 34.1 °C 8 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 68
12 Oct after 36.5 °C 8 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 67
13 Oct after 35.1 °C 11 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 88
14 Oct after 33.0 °C 8 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 85
15 Oct after 32.8 °C 6 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 74
16 Oct after 33.8 °C 9 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 83
17 Oct after 32.8 °C 10 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 84
18 Oct after 33.8 °C 7 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 72
19 Oct after 35.1 °C 6 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 27 Sept 2023
After · 16 Oct 2023

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 2023 the air beside the fire reached 168 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 53: 3.6 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak168 µg/m³
Days over the guideline8 days
PM10240 µg/m³
Optical depth2.93
23456789101112
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 · 665Every 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 Central Desert fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 4 October 2023 and 9 October 2023: 6 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 11,996 hectares (120.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Central Desert (12,045 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 32.0 °C, humidity dropped to 10 % and gusts hit 60 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 89, 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

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?

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. 665 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.