How long did the Cloncurry fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 22 August 2024 to 28 August 2024 (7 days). The perimeter dates it from 22 August 2024 to 27 August 2024.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 9,346 hectares (93.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Cloncurry (9,406 ha, 0.2 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 34.0 °C, humidity dropped to 15 % and gusts hit 40 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 50, 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 · 2024-08-22 → 2024-08-28

Cloncurry fire, 22 August 2024 Cloncurry

Out · last detection 27 Aug 2024, 16:39 UTC

The fire started on 22 August 2024 in Cloncurry, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 7 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 9,346 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 830th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1744 with a page). Number 272 in Australia in 2024, of 638.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Cloncurry · 2021 Cloncurry · 2026 Cloncurry · 2017 Cloncurry · 2023

Burnt area: 9,346ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 7days; 22 Aug 2024 – 28 Aug 2024
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 22 Aug; 2024
Heat detections: 354; in a single hotspot: 111 MW
Danger at start: 50; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 654MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 22 Aug28 Aug

Play back 27 Aug 2024

How it evolved, day by day

22 Aug 23 Aug 24 Aug 25 Aug 26 Aug 27 Aug

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

34°high

40km/h · peak gust

15%lowest humidity

It had gone 24 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

24% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 569 ha in 2020, 1,039 ha in 2021, 716 ha in 2023.

1,039 ha Cloncurry fire, November 2021 8,233 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 5.9% of the area of London (93 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

Cloncurry where it started

9,406 ha reached on 22 Aug

0.2 %

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 2025

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable 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	Danger (FWI)
22 Aug	33.3 °C	19 %	40 km/h	Very high 50
23 Aug	32.8 °C	17 %	37 km/h	Very high 49
24 Aug	33.7 °C	23 %	36 km/h	Very high 48
25 Aug	34.0 °C	16 %	32 km/h	Very high 46
26 Aug	33.9 °C	15 %	32 km/h	Very high 48
27 Aug	33.5 °C	20 %	38 km/h	Very high 49
28 Aug	33.6 °C	19 %	32 km/h	Very high 46
29 Aug after	34.6 °C	17 %	36 km/h	Very high 49
30 Aug after	35.7 °C	13 %	23 km/h	Very high 44
31 Aug after	37.0 °C	15 %	31 km/h	Very high 48
1 Sept after	37.2 °C	16 %	32 km/h	Extreme 52
2 Sept after	37.7 °C	14 %	45 km/h	Extreme 68
3 Sept after	33.8 °C	7 %	51 km/h	Very extreme 74
4 Sept after	32.1 °C	15 %	48 km/h	Extreme 67
5 Sept after	31.6 °C	28 %	45 km/h	Extreme 52
6 Sept after	31.9 °C	28 %	37 km/h	Very high 47
7 Sept after	31.8 °C	22 %	39 km/h	Very high 49

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 15 Aug 2024

After · 4 Sept 2024

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.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 25 August 2024 the air beside the fire reached 18 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak18 µg/m³

Days over the guideline0 days

PM1026 µg/m³

Optical depth0.25

WHO 15

2021222324252627282930

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 · 354Every 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 Cloncurry fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 22 August 2024 to 28 August 2024 (7 days). The perimeter dates it from 22 August 2024 to 27 August 2024.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 9,346 hectares (93.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Cloncurry (9,406 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 34.0 °C, humidity dropped to 15 % and gusts hit 40 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 50, 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

26 October 2026 Last day with fire: 27 August 2024 → 28 August 2024.

RSS Changes to this page

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.

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What do you think is wrong?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

What really happened?

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We will only use your email to reply about this report. Privacy. This is not an emergency service: if there is a fire now, call 000.

How we know this

Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 22 August 2024 to 27 August 2024. 354 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.

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