Charters Towers fire, 14 August 2022 Charters Towers
The fire started on 14 August 2022 in Charters Towers, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 16,869 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 388th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1743 with a page). Number 85 in Australia in 2022, of 566.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 16,869ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 6days
- 14 Aug 2022 – 19 Aug 2022
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- local government areas
- Started on
- 14 Aug
- 2022
- Heat detections
- 562
- in a single hotspot: 49 MW
- Danger at start
- 12
- Moderate · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 772MW
- 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 24 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 11.6 mm on 28 Aug.
This area had burned before
61% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,500 ha in 2016, 3,228 ha in 2018, 5,245 ha in 2019, 585 ha in 2020, 1,156 ha in 2021. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 10,288 ha that had burned before.
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
-
Charters Towers where it started16,842 ha reached on 14 Aug0.2 %
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 2020Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2020, 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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 14 Aug | 22.8 °C | 41 % | 22 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 12 |
| 15 Aug | 22.5 °C | 30 % | 23 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 16 |
| 16 Aug | 23.0 °C | 20 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 26 |
| 17 Aug | 20.4 °C | 26 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 25 |
| 18 Aug | 19.6 °C | 36 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 22 |
| 19 Aug | 22.0 °C | 47 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 18 |
| 20 Aug after | 23.9 °C | 34 % | 32 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 19 |
| 21 Aug after | 20.7 °C | 49 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 19 |
| 22 Aug after | 19.5 °C | 56 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 18 |
| 23 Aug after | 22.7 °C | 50 % | 19 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 14 |
| 24 Aug after | 21.0 °C | 32 % | 47 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 23 |
| 25 Aug after | 19.2 °C | 26 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 22 |
| 26 Aug after | 19.5 °C | 46 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 22 |
| 27 Aug after | 20.8 °C | 61 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 18 |
| 28 Aug after | 20.2 °C | 88 % | 41 km/h | 11.6 mm | Very low 0 |
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 14 August 2022 the air beside the fire reached 52 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 17: 1.1 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 · 562Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 11,231 haCharters Towers20 May 2026 · 5 days · 10 km away
- 50,246 haCharters TowersOctober 2023 · 24 days · 11 km away
- 19,489 haCharters Towers15 December 2019 · 20 days · 11 km away
- 20,949 haCharters Towers5 December 2023 · 7 days · 26 km away
- 16,959 haCharters Towers20 October 2018 · 25 days · 28 km away
- 11,968 haCharters Towers19 November 2025 · 9 days · 39 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Charters Towers fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 14 August 2022 and 19 August 2022: 6 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 16,869 hectares (168.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Charters Towers (16,842 ha, 0.2 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 23.0 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 41 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 26, class 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
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.
- Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 562 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 2020, 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.