Burned area
satellite only17,673ha
Perimeter published by GWIS (Copernicus).
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus)
- Date
- 16 Sept 2026 – 22 Sept 2026
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page to compare it with.
AU · Australia · –
Charters Towers fire, 16 September 2026 Charters Towers, Hinchinbrook
Out · last detection 22 Sept 2026, 15:35 UTC
The fire started on 16 September 2026 in Charters Towers, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 7 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 17,673 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.
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Fire page data · version 2026-10-24matches the official recordwith caveatssatellite onlymodel
When copying, the sentence is
Tick the figures you want: they make up the lede and the CSV.
Duration by satellite
satellite only7days
16 Sept 2026 to 22 Sept 2026: first and last day with fire on the page.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- last detection: 22 Sept 2026, 15:35 UTC
+− cross-check
Satellites pass a few times a day and cloud or smoke can hide the fire: a lack of detections is not an official extinction. Each country’s emergency service declares a fire contained or out.
Start
satellite only16 Sept 2026
First day with fire seen by the satellites or the perimeter.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- 16 Sept 2026
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page, so the alert time and the cause are not known here.
Hotspots
satellite only515
VIIRS detections at 375 m. Most intense hotspot: 53 MW.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (Suomi NPP)
- Date
- 16 Sept 2026 – 22 Sept 2026
+− cross-check
There is no official record to compare with. Each hotspot is a pixel detected in one satellite pass, not a separate fire.
The worst day
satellite only1,805MW
Total radiative power on 16 September 2026; hotspots that day: 185.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (FRP)
- Date
- 16 Sept 2026
+− cross-check
Fire radiative power (FRP) measures the energy the fire gives off when the satellite passes. Added up by day, it compares intensity, not area.
Danger at the start
model25.7FWI · high
Fire Weather Index (Canadian system) computed by WorldFires for the day the fire started. Consecutive days without rain before: 50.
- Source
- WorldFires calculation (Canadian FWI system)
- Date
- 16 Sept 2026, local noon
- Model
- ERA5 0,25° (ECMWF · Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com
+− cross-check
This is an index computed from weather model data, not a measurement of the fire nor an official warning. Danger warnings are issued by each country’s authority. Emergency number and official warnings
Weather during the fire
model24.9°C · 32% RH
High of 24.9 °C and minimum humidity of 32% on 16 September 2026; gusts of 64 km/h on 18 September 2026.
- Source
- weather model at the fire’s grid cell
- Date
- 16 Sept 2026 – 22 Sept 2026
- Model
- ERA5 0,25° (ECMWF · Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com
+− cross-check
These are model values for a cell of about 25 km, not from a weather station: they may differ from what was measured on the ground.
This page’s change log has been kept since 24 October 2026: every night what it publishes is compared and the difference is logged. Anything earlier is reconstructed from each source’s date and marked as reconstructed.
Show
-
· reconstructed GHSLPopulation and built-up area computed
-
· reconstructed weatherWeather and FWI computed from the ERA5 reanalysis
What was saved on 24 October 2026
Every night a snapshot of what the page shows is saved. If anything changes, it appears in the list as a log entry.
- Area
- 17,673 ha
- Dates
- 16 Sept 2026 – 22 Sept 2026
- Name
- Charters Towers
- Official record
- —
Versioned permanent link
https://worldfires.org/en/fire/charters-towers-2026-09-2?v=2026-10-24A version keeps the area, dates, name and official record; the area as it was logged (changes under 2% are not logged). The map, hotspots and weather always show today’s data.
Citation
A lede of about 60 words figures only, no adjectives
CSV for this fire charters-towers-2026-09-2.csv · daily, no individual hotspots
| fecha | focos_viirs | frp_mw | tmax_c | tmin_c | hr_min_pct | viento_max_kmh | racha_max_kmh | precip_mm | fwi | clase_fwi | dentro_del_incendio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-16 | 185 | 1,805 | 24.9 | 13.7 | 32 | 16.8 | 45 | 0 | 25.7 | alto | 1 |
| 2026-09-17 | 46 | 466 | 21.9 | 12.9 | 57 | 22.2 | 58 | 0 | 23.8 | alto | 1 |
| 2026-09-18 | 7 | 30 | 21 | 13.9 | 49 | 23.4 | 64.4 | 0 | 24.8 | alto | 1 |
| 2026-09-19 | 34 | 199 | 21.1 | 12.7 | 50 | 19.6 | 54 | 0 | 22.7 | alto | 1 |
| 2026-09-20 | 69 | 655 | 22.9 | 12.3 | 46 | 16.6 | 47.5 | 0 | 21.2 | moderado | 1 |
| 2026-09-21 | 89 | 502 | 23.7 | 10.5 | 45 | 18.4 | 50.8 | 0 | 22.7 | alto | 1 |
| 2026-09-22 | 85 | 628 | 23 | 13.1 | 51 | 21.5 | 56.2 | 0 | 24.8 | alto | 1 |
| 2026-09-23 | 0 | 0 | 20 | 14.9 | 69 | 20 | 50.8 | 1.2 | 10.3 | bajo | 0 |
| 2026-09-24 | 0 | 0 | 18.6 | 15.6 | 84 | 18.8 | 47.9 | 6.3 | 0.1 | muy_bajo | 0 |
| 2026-09-25 | 0 | 0 | 19.8 | 15.1 | 73 | 18.9 | 50.4 | 1.5 | 0.8 | muy_bajo | 0 |
| 2026-09-26 | 0 | 0 | 19 | 14.9 | 78 | 18.9 | 48.6 | 1.8 | 1 | muy_bajo | 0 |
| 2026-09-27 | 0 | 0 | 21.6 | 14.9 | 66 | 19.2 | 49.7 | 0.2 | 5.7 | bajo | 0 |
| 2026-09-28 | 0 | 0 | 21.9 | 14.9 | 62 | 20.1 | 52.6 | 0 | 9.3 | bajo | 0 |
| 2026-09-29 | 0 | 0 | 21.5 | 13.9 | 60 | 21.5 | 58 | 0 | 13.3 | moderado | 0 |
| 2026-09-30 | 0 | 0 | 21.8 | 14.9 | 65 | 18.6 | 52.9 | 0 | 12.8 | moderado | 0 |
| 2026-10-01 | 0 | 0 | 21.4 | 14.6 | 48 | 20.1 | 50.8 | 0 | 17.2 | moderado | 0 |
| 2026-10-02 | 0 | 0 | 20.9 | 14 | 56 | 22.5 | 60.1 | 0 | 18.5 | moderado | 0 |
| 2026-10-03 | 0 | 0 | 22.3 | 13.9 | 52 | 20.5 | 55.8 | 0 | 18.1 | moderado | 0 |
| 2026-10-04 | 0 | 0 | 23.2 | 14.2 | 53 | 16.9 | 47.2 | 0 | 16.6 | moderado | 0 |
| 2026-10-05 | 0 | 0 | 24.5 | 14 | 48 | 15 | 41 | 0 | 17.3 | moderado | 0 |
It is generated in your browser from this page’s data: one file per fire, aggregated by day and without individual hotspots.
Live widget for your story
It updates itself while the fire is still active and links to this page. Free, with the attribution shown at the bottom.
Sources for this page: GWIS (Copernicus), NASA FIRMS (VIIRS), ERA5 (ECMWF/Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0), GHSL (JRC). Open-Meteo.com · How we build fire pages: methodology
- Burnt area
- 17,673ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 7days
- 16 Sept 2026 – 22 Sept 2026
- Municipalities hit
- 2
- local government areas
- Started on
- 16 Sept
- 2026
- Heat detections
- 515
- in a single hotspot: 53 MW
- Danger at start
- 26
- High · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 612MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
HOTSPOTS BY DAY
16 Sept22 Sept
22 Sept 2026
How it evolved, day by day
16 Sept
18 Sept
20 Sept
22 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
25°high
64km/h · peak gust
32%lowest humidity
It had gone 50 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.
This area had burned before
89% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 7,645 ha in 2016, 1,029 ha in 2017, 4,792 ha in 2018, 981 ha in 2020, 7,372 ha in 2021, 157 ha in 2022, 6,239 ha in 2023, 3,203 ha in 2024, 3,038 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 15,738 ha that had burned before.
- 7,645 ha Charters Towers fire, January 2016 17,060 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 5,788 ha Charters Towers fire, December 2021 13,277 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 1,796 ha Charters Towers fire, September 2023 6,602 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
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 started17,181 ha reached on 16 Sept0.2 %
-
424 ha reached on 16 Sept0.2 %
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 2025Built-up area0.18 ha
Residents< 20
Inside the perimeter there were about 0.18 hectares of 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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16 Sept | 24.9 °C | 32 % | 45 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 26 |
| 17 Sept | 21.9 °C | 57 % | 58 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 24 |
| 18 Sept | 21.0 °C | 49 % | 64 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 25 |
| 19 Sept | 21.1 °C | 50 % | 54 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 23 |
| 20 Sept | 22.9 °C | 46 % | 48 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 21 |
| 21 Sept | 23.7 °C | 45 % | 51 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 23 |
| 22 Sept | 23.0 °C | 51 % | 56 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 25 |
| 23 Sept after | 20.0 °C | 69 % | 51 km/h | 1.2 mm | Low 10 |
| 24 Sept after | 18.6 °C | 84 % | 48 km/h | 6.3 mm | Very low 0 |
| 25 Sept after | 19.8 °C | 73 % | 50 km/h | 1.5 mm | Very low 1 |
| 26 Sept after | 19.0 °C | 78 % | 49 km/h | 1.8 mm | Very low 1 |
| 27 Sept after | 21.6 °C | 66 % | 50 km/h | 0.2 mm | Low 6 |
| 28 Sept after | 21.9 °C | 62 % | 53 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 9 |
| 29 Sept after | 21.5 °C | 60 % | 58 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 13 |
| 30 Sept after | 21.8 °C | 65 % | 53 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 13 |
| 1 Oct after | 21.4 °C | 48 % | 51 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 17 |
| 2 Oct after | 20.9 °C | 56 % | 60 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 18 |
| 3 Oct after | 22.3 °C | 52 % | 56 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 18 |
| 4 Oct after | 23.2 °C | 53 % | 47 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 17 |
| 5 Oct after | 24.5 °C | 48 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 17 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
↔
Before · 9 Sept 2026
After · 29 Sept 2026
Sentinel-2 did not pass over on that day. Try another date, or use false colour, which is daily.
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 21 September 2026 the air beside the fire reached 36 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 20: 1.3 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
PM2.5 peak36 µg/m³
Days over the guideline2 days
PM1039 µg/m³
Optical depth0.31
WHO 15
14 Sept17 Sept20 Sept23 Sept
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 · 515Every 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
- 17,060 haCharters TowersJanuary 2016 · 12 days · 5 km away
- 13,277 haCharters Towers5 December 2021 · 13 days · 7 km away
- 11,968 haCharters Towers19 November 2025 · 9 days · 24 km away
- 16,959 haCharters Towers20 October 2018 · 25 days · 31 km away
- 16,684 haCharters Towers8 September 2017 · 10 days · 33 km away
- 20,949 haCharters Towers5 December 2023 · 7 days · 38 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Charters Towers fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 16 September 2026 and 22 September 2026: 7 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 17,673 hectares (176.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 2 municipalities: Charters Towers (17,181 ha, 0.2 %); Hinchinbrook (424 ha, 0.2 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 24.9 °C, humidity dropped to 32 % and gusts hit 64 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.
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
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. 515 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.
- Probably a vegetation burn: not counted in the totals.
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.