How long did the Charters Towers fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 8 September 2017 and 17 September 2017: 10 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 16,684 hectares (166.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire entered 2 municipalities: Charters Towers (9,470 ha, 0.1 %); Tablelands (7,231 ha, 0.6 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 30.0 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 38, class Very high.

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 · 2017-09-08 → 2017-09-17

Charters Towers fire, 8 September 2017 Charters Towers, Tablelands

Out · last detection 17 Sept 2017, 15:48 UTC

The fire started on 8 September 2017 in Charters Towers, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 10 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 16,684 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 393th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 156 in Australia in 2017, of 862.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Tablelands · 2017 Tablelands · 2023 Tablelands · 2019 Tablelands · 2018

Burnt area: 16,684ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 10days; 8 Sept 2017 – 17 Sept 2017
Municipalities hit: 2; local government areas
Started on: 8 Sept; 2017
Heat detections: 905; in a single hotspot: 84 MW
Danger at start: 26; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 576MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 8 Sept17 Sept

Play back 17 Sept 2017

How it evolved, day by day

8 Sept 10 Sept 12 Sept 14 Sept 16 Sept

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

48km/h · peak gust

20%lowest humidity

It had gone 32 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.8 mm on 1 Oct.

This area had burned before

1% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 150 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 11% of the area of London (167 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

Charters Towers where it started

9,470 ha reached on 8 Sept

0.1 %
Tablelands

7,231 ha reached on 8 Sept

0.6 %

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 2015

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2015, 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.

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)
8 Sept	24.8 °C	42 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
9 Sept	25.0 °C	33 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	High 29
10 Sept	24.2 °C	40 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
11 Sept	24.3 °C	46 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
12 Sept	25.0 °C	48 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	High 24
13 Sept	27.8 °C	36 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
14 Sept	30.0 °C	20 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
15 Sept	24.8 °C	27 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
16 Sept	25.9 °C	31 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
17 Sept	25.7 °C	34 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
18 Sept after	26.3 °C	42 %	48 km/h	0.2 mm	High 30
19 Sept after	19.7 °C	92 %	31 km/h	6.9 mm	Very low 0
20 Sept after	28.0 °C	38 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	Low 6
21 Sept after	28.2 °C	29 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
22 Sept after	29.1 °C	36 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 24
23 Sept after	29.3 °C	30 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
24 Sept after	28.2 °C	30 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
25 Sept after	28.2 °C	30 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
26 Sept after	29.4 °C	23 %	29 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
27 Sept after	30.2 °C	27 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
28 Sept after	29.1 °C	31 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
29 Sept after	28.1 °C	39 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
30 Sept after	30.7 °C	28 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
1 Oct after	30.4 °C	38 %	26 km/h	2.8 mm	Low 9

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 1 Sept 2017

After · 24 Sept 2017

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.

Detections table · 905Every 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 Charters Towers fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 8 September 2017 and 17 September 2017: 10 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 16,684 hectares (166.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire entered 2 municipalities: Charters Towers (9,470 ha, 0.1 %); Tablelands (7,231 ha, 0.6 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 30.0 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 38, class Very high.
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

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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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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. 905 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 2015, 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