Burned area
satellite only19,087ha
Perimeter published by GWIS (Copernicus).
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus)
- Date
- 6 Nov 2026 – 13 Nov 2026
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page to compare it with.
AU · Australia · –
Charters Towers fire, November 2026 Charters Towers
Burning · last detection 14 Nov 2026, 03:53 UTC
The fire started on 6 November 2026 in Charters Towers, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 8 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 19,087 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
Number 10 in Australia in 2026, of 86.
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 · no saved version yetmatches the official recordwith caveatssatellite onlymodel
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Tick the figures you want: they make up the lede and the CSV.
Duration by satellite
satellite only8days
From 6 Nov 2026 to today: still being detected.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- last detection: 14 Nov 2026, 03:53 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 only6 Nov 2026
First day with fire seen by the satellites or the perimeter.
- Source
- GWIS (Copernicus) · NASA FIRMS · VIIRS
- Date
- 6 Nov 2026
+− cross-check
No official record is matched to this page, so the alert time and the cause are not known here.
Hotspots
satellite only586
VIIRS detections at 375 m. Most intense hotspot: 55 MW.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (NOAA-20)
- Date
- 6 Nov 2026 – 13 Nov 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 only1,735MW
Total radiative power on 11 November 2026; hotspots that day: 237.
- Source
- NASA FIRMS · VIIRS (FRP)
- Date
- 11 Nov 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.
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Versioned permanent link
This page has no snapshot in the log yet: the first one is saved tonight. Meanwhile, cite the page link with the date you accessed it.
Citation
A lede of about 60 words figures only, no adjectives
CSV for this fire charters-towers-2026-11-4.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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-11-06 | 0 | 0 | 1 | ||||||||
| 2026-11-07 | 0 | 0 | 1 | ||||||||
| 2026-11-08 | 26 | 299 | 1 | ||||||||
| 2026-11-09 | 1 | 4 | 1 | ||||||||
| 2026-11-10 | 59 | 484 | 1 | ||||||||
| 2026-11-11 | 237 | 1,735 | 1 | ||||||||
| 2026-11-12 | 155 | 1,130 | 1 | ||||||||
| 2026-11-13 | 108 | 403 | 1 | ||||||||
| 2026-11-14 | 12 | 108 | 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). Open-Meteo.com · How we build fire pages: methodology
Is it still active?
Satellites detected fire on 14 Nov 2026, 03:53 UTC. Everything suggests it is still burning. 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.
- Burnt area
- 19,087ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 8days
- 6 Nov 2026 – 13 Nov 2026
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- local government areas
- Started on
- 6 Nov
- 2026
- Heat detections
- 586
- in a single hotspot: 55 MW
- Average daily power
- 595MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
HOTSPOTS BY DAY
6 Nov13 Nov
14 Nov 2026
How it evolved, day by day
6 Nov
8 Nov
11 Nov
14 Nov
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
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 started19,101 ha reached on 6 Nov0.3 %
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.
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
↔
Before · 30 Oct 2026
After · 13 Nov 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.
Detections table · 586Every 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
- 17,268 haCharters Towers14 November 2020 · 21 days · 13 km away
- 30,067 haCharters Towers 31 October 2026 · 14 days · 20 km away
- 12,189 haCharters Towers27 December 2019 · 16 days · 22 km away
- 11,800 haCharters Towers 5 November 2026 · 9 days · 22 km away
- 37,477 haCharters Towers14 December 2017 · 17 days · 23 km away
- 8,831 haFlinders (Qld)7 December 2017 · 19 days · 38 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Charters Towers fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 6 November 2026 and 13 November 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 19,087 hectares (190.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Charters Towers (19,101 ha, 0.3 %).
- Is the Charters Towers fire still active?
- Yes: satellites detected fire on 14 Nov 2026, 03:53 UTC. Check the emergency service for the official status.
- 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
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. 586 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
- We have not matched this page with any official record.
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.