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Inverell fire, October 2023 Inverell

Out · last detection 16 Oct 2023, 04:09 UTC

The fire started on 11 October 2023 in Inverell, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,766 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 105th largest in New South Wales since 2016 (of 130 with a page). Number 1053 in Australia in 2023, of 1235.

Compare with…
Burnt area
5,766ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
6days
11 Oct 2023 – 16 Oct 2023
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
11 Oct
2023
Heat detections
330
in a single hotspot: 91 MW
Danger at start
28
High · FWI index
Average daily power
562MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 11 Oct16 Oct
16 Oct 2023

How it evolved, day by day

11 Oct 2023 · 14 MW · 4 12 Oct 2023 · 496 MW · 49 13 Oct 2023 · 2,294 MW · 179 14 Oct 2023 · 398 MW · 66 15 Oct 2023 · 126 MW · 30 16 Oct 2023 · 42 MW · 2
11 Oct 12 Oct 13 Oct 14 Oct 15 Oct 16 Oct

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

The weather it burned in

30°high
59km/h · peak gust
16%lowest humidity

It had gone 5 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.3 mm on 25 Oct.

This area had burned before

2% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 87 ha in 2019.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 3.6% of the area of London (58 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. Inverell where it started
    5,778 ha reached on 11 Oct
    0.6 %

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 area3.5 ha
Residents≈ 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 3.5 hectares of built-up land and about 20 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)
11 Oct 27.9 °C 21 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
12 Oct 28.4 °C 24 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
13 Oct 24.4 °C 18 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
14 Oct 26.1 °C 22 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
15 Oct 29.7 °C 16 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
16 Oct 29.6 °C 20 % 59 km/h 0.1 mm Very high 48
17 Oct after 25.6 °C 16 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
18 Oct after 25.5 °C 25 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
19 Oct after 25.9 °C 26 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
20 Oct after 27.7 °C 25 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
21 Oct after 30.1 °C 22 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
22 Oct after 31.5 °C 23 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
23 Oct after 30.4 °C 17 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
24 Oct after 32.5 °C 15 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
25 Oct after 33.6 °C 23 % 44 km/h 1.3 mm Very high 38

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 4 Oct 2023
After · 23 Oct 2023

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 18 October 2023 the air beside the fire reached 33 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak33 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1048 µg/m³
Optical depth0.36
910111213141516171819
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 · 330Every 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

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Inverell fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 11 October 2023 and 16 October 2023: 6 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 5,766 hectares (57.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Inverell (5,778 ha, 0.6 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 29.7 °C, humidity dropped to 16 % and gusts hit 59 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 48, 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

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

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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 330 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.