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AU · Australia · –

Cloncurry fire, 2 November 2026 Cloncurry

Burning · last detection 10 Nov 2026, 04:25 UTC

The fire started on 2 November 2026 in Cloncurry, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 16,449 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

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.

Is it still active?

Satellites detected fire on 10 Nov 2026, 04:25 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
16,449ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
9days
2 Nov 2026 – 10 Nov 2026
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
2 Nov
2026
Heat detections
405
in a single hotspot: 307 MW
Danger at start
26
High · FWI index
Average daily power
1.1GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 2 Nov10 Nov
10 Nov 2026

How it evolved, day by day

3 Nov 2026 · 1 MW · 1 4 Nov 2026 · 3,227 MW · 78 5 Nov 2026 · 55 MW · 7 6 Nov 2026 · 31 MW · 10 7 Nov 2026 · 573 MW · 48 8 Nov 2026 · 3,367 MW · 127 9 Nov 2026 · 1,049 MW · 115 10 Nov 2026 · 144 MW · 19
3 Nov 5 Nov 8 Nov

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

Fire front film How it spread from one satellite pass to the next (27 passes) and with what wind. Watch the film

The weather it burned in

40°high
45km/h · peak gust
10%lowest humidity

It had gone 2 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

7% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,187 ha in 2021.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 10% of the area of London (164 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

  1. Cloncurry where it started
    16,555 ha reached on 3 Nov
    0.3 %

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.

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) · forecast models, provisional until the ERA5 reanalysis arrives

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
2 Nov 39.5 °C 23 % 45 km/h 0.9 mm High 26
3 Nov 38.4 °C 27 % 30 km/h 2.7 mm High 23
4 Nov 39.1 °C 23 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
5 Nov 37.3 °C 25 % 32 km/h 1.4 mm High 28
6 Nov 36.8 °C 31 % 35 km/h 0.3 mm High 28
7 Nov 39.0 °C 13 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
8 Nov 39.2 °C 10 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
9 Nov 39.8 °C 12 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 26 Oct 2026
After · 9 Nov 2026

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 6 November 2026 the air beside the fire reached 55 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 30: 2.0 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak55 µg/m³
Days over the guideline1 day
PM1057 µg/m³
Optical depth0.77
31 Oct2 Nov4 Nov6 Nov
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 · 405Every 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 timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

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 2 November 2026 to 10 November 2026 (9 days). The perimeter dates it from 2 November 2026 to 9 November 2026.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 16,449 hectares (164.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Cloncurry (16,555 ha, 0.3 %).
Is the Cloncurry fire still active?
Yes: satellites detected fire on 10 Nov 2026, 04:25 UTC. Check the emergency service for the official status.
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 39.8 °C, humidity dropped to 10 % and gusts hit 45 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 62, class 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 · 3 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 7 November 2026.
  1. Area: 7,069 → 7,907 ha.
  2. Area: 5,059 → 7,069 ha.
  3. Page published (5,059 ha).

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
What do you think is wrong?

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 2 November 2026 to 9 November 2026. 405 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.
  • Weather: ECMWF IFS model, provisional until the ERA5 reanalysis arrives.
  • Probably a vegetation burn: not counted in the totals.

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.