How long did the Maranoa fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 13 October 2021 and 22 October 2021: 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 9,010 hectares (90.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Maranoa (8,953 ha, 0.2 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 34.0 °C, humidity dropped to 10 % and gusts hit 55 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 43, 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 · 2021-10-13 → 2021-10-22

Maranoa fire, 13 October 2021 Maranoa

Out · last detection 23 Oct 2021, 03:27 UTC

The fire started on 13 October 2021 in Maranoa, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 10 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 9,010 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 865th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 203 in Australia in 2021, of 460.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Maranoa · 2019 Central Highlands (Qld) · 2016 Central Highlands (Qld) · 2023 Central Highlands (Qld) · 2020

Burnt area: 9,010ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 10days; 13 Oct 2021 – 22 Oct 2021
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 13 Oct; 2021
Heat detections: 758; in a single hotspot: 234 MW
Danger at start: 18; Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power: 722MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 13 Oct22 Oct

Play back 23 Oct 2021

How it evolved, day by day

13 Oct 15 Oct 17 Oct 19 Oct 21 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

34°high

55km/h · peak gust

10%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 15.1 mm on 25 Oct.

This area had burned before

21% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 51 ha in 2016, 655 ha in 2017, 1,024 ha in 2019, 343 ha in 2020. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,934 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 5.7% of the area of London (90 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

Maranoa where it started

8,953 ha reached on 13 Oct

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.

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)
13 Oct	30.3 °C	25 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 18
14 Oct	31.8 °C	10 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
15 Oct	26.4 °C	10 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
16 Oct	27.0 °C	14 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
17 Oct	29.1 °C	14 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
18 Oct	30.1 °C	12 %	54 km/h	0.2 mm	Very high 43
19 Oct	31.0 °C	10 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
20 Oct	30.5 °C	10 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
21 Oct	32.1 °C	13 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
22 Oct	33.3 °C	22 %	37 km/h	1.6 mm	High 30
23 Oct after	34.0 °C	22 %	55 km/h	0.5 mm	Very high 40
24 Oct after	30.8 °C	22 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
25 Oct after	28.8 °C	36 %	30 km/h	15.1 mm	Very low 3

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 6 Oct 2021

After · 29 Oct 2021

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 · 758Every 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 Maranoa fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 13 October 2021 and 22 October 2021: 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 9,010 hectares (90.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Maranoa (8,953 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 34.0 °C, humidity dropped to 10 % and gusts hit 55 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 43, 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 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.

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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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 758 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