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AU · Australia · –

Central Desert fire, 13 October 2025 Central Desert, Barkly

Out · last detection 27 Oct 2025, 16:55 UTC

The fire started on 13 October 2025 in Central Desert, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 15 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 63,665 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

This entry is probably a savanna fire in Australia’s tropical north, not a bushfire like those in the south of the country. Millions of hectares of northern savanna and grassland burn every year: much of it in burns lit on purpose early in the dry season (traditional fire management, parks and cattle stations), the rest in grass fires that return to the same ground every few years. This is our assumption, based on the location; it is not confirmed. That is why it is left out of the wildfire rankings.

GWIS near-real-time perimeter, from the layer that changed in October 2025: this fire is not compared with fires from earlier years, because since then the GWIS layer gives more and larger perimeters.

Burnt area
63,665ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
15days
13 Oct 2025 – 27 Oct 2025
Municipalities hit
2
local government areas
Started on
13 Oct
2025
Heat detections
1,298
in a single hotspot: 400 MW
Danger at start
60
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
2.0GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 13 Oct27 Oct
27 Oct 2025

How it evolved, day by day

13 Oct 2025 · 3 MW · 2 15 Oct 2025 · 40 MW · 17 16 Oct 2025 · 128 MW · 13 17 Oct 2025 · 621 MW · 14 18 Oct 2025 · 58 MW · 6 19 Oct 2025 · 226 MW · 32 20 Oct 2025 · 12,402 MW · 124 21 Oct 2025 · 713 MW · 92 22 Oct 2025 · 717 MW · 82 23 Oct 2025 · 2,149 MW · 209 24 Oct 2025 · 5,126 MW · 371 25 Oct 2025 · 3,260 MW · 183 26 Oct 2025 · 2,168 MW · 125 27 Oct 2025 · 315 MW · 28
13 Oct 17 Oct 20 Oct 23 Oct 26 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

41°high
53km/h · peak gust
9%lowest humidity

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

This area had burned before

73% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 7,612 ha in 2017, 14,723 ha in 2018, 38,573 ha in 2023, 26 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 46,349 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 40% of the area of London (637 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
    49,314 ha
    0.2 %
  2. 14,080 ha
    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.

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)

Started with Extreme FWI: 43 % of the area in Australia

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
13 Oct 39.1 °C 18 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
14 Oct 38.1 °C 24 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 75
15 Oct 38.8 °C 17 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 105
16 Oct 38.0 °C 24 % 30 km/h 0.6 mm Extreme 56
17 Oct 41.0 °C 9 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 76
18 Oct 40.8 °C 17 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 88
19 Oct 40.4 °C 15 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 101
20 Oct 39.8 °C 16 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 82
21 Oct 40.1 °C 16 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 100
22 Oct 39.9 °C 11 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 82
23 Oct 40.2 °C 17 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 74
24 Oct 41.2 °C 13 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 95
25 Oct 40.0 °C 23 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
26 Oct 41.1 °C 17 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 72
27 Oct 39.2 °C 25 % 35 km/h 2.2 mm Extreme 53
28 Oct after 36.4 °C 23 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
29 Oct after 37.9 °C 19 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
30 Oct after 39.6 °C 21 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
31 Oct after 40.2 °C 21 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
1 Nov after 41.7 °C 14 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 64
2 Nov after 41.0 °C 20 % 40 km/h 0.1 mm Very extreme 70
3 Nov after 31.8 °C 36 % 45 km/h 0.8 mm Very high 47
4 Nov after 32.2 °C 23 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
5 Nov after 35.3 °C 17 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
6 Nov after 38.7 °C 16 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 87

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 6 Oct 2025
After · 3 Nov 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 21 October 2025 the air beside the fire reached 93 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 48: 3.2 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak93 µg/m³
Days over the guideline11 days
PM1094 µg/m³
Optical depth0.86
15 Oct19 Oct23 Oct27 Oct
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 · 1,298Every 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?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 13 October 2025 to 27 October 2025 (15 days). The perimeter dates it from 17 October 2025 to 27 October 2025.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 63,665 hectares (636.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Central Desert (49,314 ha, 0.2 %); Barkly (14,080 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 41.2 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 53 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 105, 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Start date: 17 October 2025 → 13 October 2025.

RSS Changes to this page With cross-checks and a citable version

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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 17 October 2025 to 27 October 2025. 1,298 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.
  • Probably a vegetation burn: not counted in the totals.

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.