How long did the Mackay fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 19 January 2017 and 28 January 2017: 10 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 8,241 hectares (82.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Mackay (8,270 ha, 1.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 32.6 °C, humidity dropped to 36 % and gusts hit 45 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 6, class Low.

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 · 2017-01-19 → 2017-01-28

Mackay fire, January 2017 Mackay

Out · last detection 28 Jan 2017, 03:46 UTC

The fire started on 19 January 2017 in Mackay, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 10 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 8,241 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 966th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 453 in Australia in 2017, of 862.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Mackay · 2024 Whitsunday · 2022 Mackay · 2017 Mackay · 2024

Burnt area: 8,241ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 10days; 19 Jan 2017 – 28 Jan 2017
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 19 Jan; 2017
Heat detections: 285; in a single hotspot: 168 MW
Danger at start: 4; Very low · FWI index
Average daily power: 252MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 19 Jan28 Jan

Play back 28 Jan 2017

How it evolved, day by day

19 Jan 21 Jan 23 Jan 25 Jan 27 Jan

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

The weather it burned in

33°high

45km/h · peak gust

36%lowest humidity

It had gone one day without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 6.2 mm on 30 Jan.

This area had burned before

2% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 170 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 5.2% of the area of London (82 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

Mackay where it started

8,270 ha reached on 19 Jan

1.1 %

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) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)

Day	High	Min. humidity	Peak gust	Rain	Danger (FWI)
19 Jan	32.6 °C	36 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	Very low 4
20 Jan	31.2 °C	36 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	Low 6
21 Jan	32.3 °C	47 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	Low 6
22 Jan	30.4 °C	55 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Low 6
23 Jan	26.9 °C	74 %	43 km/h	2.5 mm	Very low 1
24 Jan	29.2 °C	52 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	Very low 3
25 Jan	29.9 °C	51 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Low 6
26 Jan	29.1 °C	55 %	40 km/h	0.2 mm	Low 6
27 Jan	30.5 °C	50 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	Low 6
28 Jan	28.5 °C	68 %	41 km/h	2.0 mm	Very low 1
29 Jan after	29.5 °C	51 %	50 km/h	0.0 mm	Low 6
30 Jan after	25.5 °C	74 %	55 km/h	6.2 mm	Very low 0

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 12 Jan 2017

After · 4 Feb 2017

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.

Detections table · 285Every 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 Mackay fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 19 January 2017 and 28 January 2017: 10 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 8,241 hectares (82.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Mackay (8,270 ha, 1.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 32.6 °C, humidity dropped to 36 % and gusts hit 45 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 6, class Low.
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 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?

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

What really happened?

Your connection to the fire (optional) Email (optional)

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. 285 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.

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