Cloncurry fire, 20 December 2023 Cloncurry, Mount Isa
The fire started on 20 December 2023 in Cloncurry, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 17 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 148,754 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.
This page is probably a fire complex, not a single fire. GWIS merges into one perimeter the fires that touch over weeks, which in large burning seasons can join dozens of separate fires. The total area is reliable; the origin and dates refer to the whole complex.
Other fire pages in the same area and on the same dates:
It is the 14th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1748 with a page). Number 13 in Australia in 2023, of 1235.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 148,754ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 17days
- 20 Dec 2023 – 5 Jan 2024
- Municipalities hit
- 2
- local government areas
- Started on
- 20 Dec
- 2023
- Heat detections
- 5,316
- in a single hotspot: 326 MW
- Danger at start
- 48
- Very high · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 4.1GW
- 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 16 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 4.0 mm on 6 Jan.
This area had burned before
18% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 13,947 ha in 2017, 201 ha in 2019, 1,488 ha in 2020, 9,912 ha in 2021, 2,118 ha in 2022.
- 8,329 ha Cloncurry fire, December 2017 10,489 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 3,268 ha Cloncurry fire, December 2021 13,294 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 1,776 ha Cloncurry fire, December 2021 23,272 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 1,414 ha Cloncurry fire, December 2022 5,533 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 1,196 ha Cloncurry fire, September 2017 5,465 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 5 ha Cloncurry fire, December 2019 5,273 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
-
Cloncurry where it started148,408 ha reached on 20 Dec3.1 %
-
1,280 ha reached on 27 Dec0.0 %
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 2025Inside the perimeter there were about 4.9 hectares of built-up land and about 30 residents (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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 Dec | 38.9 °C | 19 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 48 |
| 21 Dec | 38.3 °C | 18 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 45 |
| 22 Dec | 37.5 °C | 12 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 50 |
| 23 Dec | 40.9 °C | 9 % | 33 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 51 |
| 24 Dec | 42.8 °C | 8 % | 44 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 63 |
| 25 Dec | 38.5 °C | 14 % | 44 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 61 |
| 26 Dec | 37.3 °C | 6 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 60 |
| 27 Dec | 38.8 °C | 5 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 62 |
| 28 Dec | 41.5 °C | 4 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 68 |
| 29 Dec | 43.1 °C | 7 % | 39 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very extreme 70 |
| 30 Dec | 43.8 °C | 8 % | 54 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very extreme 90 |
| 31 Dec | 39.5 °C | 7 % | 55 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very extreme 93 |
| 1 Jan | 40.8 °C | 5 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very extreme 70 |
| 2 Jan | 41.2 °C | 11 % | 47 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very extreme 74 |
| 3 Jan | 39.6 °C | 23 % | 62 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very extreme 83 |
| 4 Jan | 36.2 °C | 29 % | 56 km/h | 0.0 mm | Extreme 53 |
| 5 Jan | 37.9 °C | 30 % | 47 km/h | 5.1 mm | High 28 |
| 6 Jan after | 35.1 °C | 38 % | 36 km/h | 4.0 mm | Moderate 15 |
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 28 December 2023 the air beside the fire reached 111 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 44: 2.9 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 · 5,316Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 10,489 haCloncurry7 December 2017 · 8 days · 6 km away
- 13,294 haCloncurry5 December 2021 · 10 days · 20 km away
- 7,443 haCloncurry21 October 2026 · 6 days · 21 km away
- 43,576 haCloncurry19 October 2024 · 6 days · 30 km away
- 9,346 haCloncurry22 August 2024 · 7 days · 30 km away
- 38,754 haMount Isa16 October 2023 · 17 days · 40 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Cloncurry fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 20 December 2023 and 5 January 2024: 17 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 148,754 hectares (1,487.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 2 municipalities: Cloncurry (148,408 ha, 3.1 %); Mount Isa (1,280 ha, 0.0 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 43.8 °C, humidity dropped to 4 % and gusts hit 62 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 93, class Very 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
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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
- Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 5,316 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.
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.