Central Desert fire, 17 October 2023 Central Desert
The fire started on 17 October 2023 in Central Desert, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 17 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 207,590 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:
- 176,889 haCentral Desert16 October 2023 · 14 days
- 91,458 haCentral Desert4 October 2023 · 30 days
- 42,522 haCentral Desert15 September 2023 · 46 days
- 15,613 haCentral Desert21 October 2023 · 4 days
- 15,314 haCentral Desert21 October 2023 · 4 days
- 8,600 haCentral Desert22 October 2023 · 3 days
- 6,675 haCentral Desert25 October 2023 · 8 days
- 6,185 haCentral Desert24 October 2023 · 7 days
It is the 12th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3519 with a page). Number 7 in Australia in 2023, of 1235.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 207,590ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 17days
- 17 Oct 2023 – 2 Nov 2023
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- local government areas
- Started on
- 17 Oct
- 2023
- Heat detections
- 9,453
- in a single hotspot: 1,729 MW
- Danger at start
- 67
- Extreme · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 9.4GW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.9 mm on 3 Nov.
This area had burned before
43% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 3,556 ha in 2016, 74,625 ha in 2017, 8,526 ha in 2018, 2,674 ha in 2019, 450 ha in 2021, 1,738 ha in 2022.
- 53,971 ha Central Desert fire, September 2017 105,127 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 3,556 ha Central Desert fire, October 2016 11,790 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 2,641 ha Central Desert fire, December 2017 6,193 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 2,498 ha Central Desert fire, September 2018 5,682 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 1,637 ha Central Desert fire, September 2018 14,686 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
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 started206,961 ha reached on 17 Oct0.7 %
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 2025Inside the perimeter there were about 0.38 hectares of 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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 17 Oct | 34.2 °C | 10 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 67 |
| 18 Oct | 34.9 °C | 8 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 64 |
| 19 Oct | 36.3 °C | 6 % | 29 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 57 |
| 20 Oct | 37.7 °C | 5 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 59 |
| 21 Oct | 38.7 °C | 6 % | 33 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 66 |
| 22 Oct | 38.7 °C | 9 % | 45 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very extreme 75 |
| 23 Oct | 39.0 °C | 14 % | 28 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 61 |
| 24 Oct | 39.7 °C | 16 % | 47 km/h | 0.3 mm | Very extreme 75 |
| 25 Oct | 38.6 °C | 13 % | 43 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 69 |
| 26 Oct | 34.6 °C | 12 % | 50 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very extreme 76 |
| 27 Oct | 34.5 °C | 8 % | 50 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very extreme 76 |
| 28 Oct | 35.1 °C | 4 % | 39 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 67 |
| 29 Oct | 36.7 °C | 5 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 64 |
| 30 Oct | 39.4 °C | 6 % | 30 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 59 |
| 31 Oct | 40.9 °C | 10 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 69 |
| 1 Nov | 40.3 °C | 14 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 66 |
| 2 Nov | 39.2 °C | 20 % | 42 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 62 |
| 3 Nov after | 34.7 °C | 24 % | 33 km/h | 1.9 mm | High 30 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
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 · CopernicusOn 19 October 2023 the air beside the fire reached 205 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 105: 7.0 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
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 · 9,453Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Central Desert fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 17 October 2023 and 2 November 2023: 17 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 207,590 hectares (2,075.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Central Desert (206,961 ha, 0.7 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 40.9 °C, humidity dropped to 4 % and gusts hit 50 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 76, 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.
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
How we know this
- Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery; 5 polygons grouped in this page.
- Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 9,453 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.
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.