How long did the Central Desert fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 5 August 2026 and 12 August 2026: 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 46,681 hectares (466.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Central Desert (46,885 ha, 0.2 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 31.2 °C, humidity dropped to 13 % and gusts hit 58 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 60, 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.

AU · Australia · 2026-08-05 → 2026-08-12

Central Desert fire, 5 August 2026 Central Desert

Out · last detection 12 Aug 2026, 05:33 UTC

The fire started on 5 August 2026 in Central Desert, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 8 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 46,681 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 189th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3511 with a page). Number 40 in Australia in 2026, of 891.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Central Desert · 2023 Central Desert · 2023 Central Desert · 2023 Central Desert · 2026

Burnt area: 46,681ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 8days; 5 Aug 2026 – 12 Aug 2026
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 5 Aug; 2026
Heat detections: 1,171; in a single hotspot: 351 MW
Danger at start: 40; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 2.6GW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 5 Aug12 Aug

Play back 12 Aug 2026

How it evolved, day by day

5 Aug 7 Aug 8 Aug 9 Aug 11 Aug

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

The weather it burned in

31°high

58km/h · peak gust

13%lowest humidity

It had gone 27 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

15% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 115 ha in 2017, 386 ha in 2018, 6,569 ha in 2023, 175 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 6,894 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 29% of the area of London (467 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

46,885 ha reached on 5 Aug

0.2 %

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)
5 Aug	28.5 °C	21 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
6 Aug	28.5 °C	14 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 42
7 Aug	29.6 °C	18 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 42
8 Aug	31.2 °C	16 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 44
9 Aug	22.3 °C	14 %	58 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 60
10 Aug	23.3 °C	13 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
11 Aug	30.3 °C	21 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 52
12 Aug	25.2 °C	20 %	50 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 53
13 Aug after	24.0 °C	20 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 52
14 Aug after	26.8 °C	22 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
15 Aug after	27.1 °C	20 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 50
16 Aug after	26.9 °C	20 %	39 km/h	0.1 mm	Very high 48
17 Aug after	29.8 °C	23 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 52
18 Aug after	30.5 °C	28 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
19 Aug after	30.5 °C	31 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 38
20 Aug after	31.1 °C	23 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 52
21 Aug after	32.7 °C	21 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 53
22 Aug after	26.7 °C	37 %	49 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 46

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 29 Jul 2026

After · 19 Aug 2026

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 7 August 2026 the air beside the fire reached 188 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 97: 6.5 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak188 µg/m³

Days over the guideline5 days

PM10189 µg/m³

Optical depth1.03

WHO 15

3456789101112131415

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 · 1,171Every 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 5 August 2026 and 12 August 2026: 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 46,681 hectares (466.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Central Desert (46,885 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 31.2 °C, humidity dropped to 13 % and gusts hit 58 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 60, 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 · 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 do you think is wrong?

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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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 1,171 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