Skip to content
worldfires
en
AU · Australia · →

Central Desert fire, June 2025 Central Desert

Out · last detection 7 Jul 2025, 05:42 UTC

The fire started on 29 June 2025 in Central Desert, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 8 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 16,497 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 804th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3496 with a page). Number 258 in Australia in 2025, of 1124.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Central Desert · 2023Central Desert · 2023Central Desert · 2025Victoria Daly · 2023

Burnt area
16,497ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
8days
29 Jun 2025 – 6 Jul 2025
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
29 Jun
2025
Heat detections
560
in a single hotspot: 189 MW
Danger at start
56
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
991MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

7 Jul 2025
HOTSPOTS BY DAY 29 Jun6 Jul

How it evolved, day by day

29 Jun 2025 · 33 MW · 9 30 Jun 2025 · 3,365 MW · 170 1 Jul 2025 · 444 MW · 116 2 Jul 2025 · 174 MW · 53 3 Jul 2025 · 141 MW · 16 4 Jul 2025 · 1,853 MW · 57 5 Jul 2025 · 671 MW · 38 6 Jul 2025 · 1,907 MW · 64 7 Jul 2025 · 327 MW · 32
29 Jun 30 Jun 1 Jul 3 Jul 5 Jul 7 Jul

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

The weather it burned in

30°high
53km/h · peak gust
12%lowest humidity

It had gone 31 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

60% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,359 ha in 2017, 8,305 ha in 2023, 352 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 9,899 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 10% of the area of London (165 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
    16,319 ha reached on 29 Jun
    0.1 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance is from the town centre to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.

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 Jun 22.6 °C 15 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
30 Jun 22.7 °C 17 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
1 Jul 23.5 °C 20 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
2 Jul 25.5 °C 15 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
3 Jul 27.4 °C 13 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
4 Jul 30.0 °C 14 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
5 Jul 28.4 °C 18 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
6 Jul 29.1 °C 16 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
7 Jul after 28.1 °C 15 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
8 Jul after 28.2 °C 12 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
9 Jul after 29.2 °C 13 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
10 Jul after 26.6 °C 18 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
11 Jul after 24.5 °C 20 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
12 Jul after 28.4 °C 20 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
13 Jul after 30.2 °C 22 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
14 Jul after 30.2 °C 16 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
15 Jul after 31.7 °C 17 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
16 Jul after 29.4 °C 21 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
17 Jul after 28.8 °C 21 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
18 Jul after 25.9 °C 24 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
19 Jul after 26.2 °C 18 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 22 Jun 2025
After · 13 Jul 2025

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 8 July 2025 the air beside the fire reached 77 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 49: 3.3 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak77 µg/m³
Days over the guideline4 days
PM1078 µg/m³
Optical depth0.60
27282930123456789
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 · 560Every 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 29 June 2025 and 6 July 2025: 8 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 16,497 hectares (165.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Central Desert (16,319 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 30.0 °C, humidity dropped to 12 % and gusts hit 53 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 56, 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

Satellite cross-check

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. 560 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.

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.