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Mareeba fire, 28 October 2022 Mareeba

Out · last detection 5 Nov 2022, 03:42 UTC

The fire started on 28 October 2022 in Mareeba, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 15,295 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 440th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1742 with a page). Number 105 in Australia in 2022, of 566.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Mareeba · 2016Mareeba · 2020Mareeba · 2016Mareeba · 2025

Burnt area
15,295ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
9days
28 Oct 2022 – 5 Nov 2022
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
28 Oct
2022
Heat detections
478
in a single hotspot: 142 MW
Danger at start
44
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
460MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 28 Oct5 Nov
5 Nov 2022

How it evolved, day by day

28 Oct 2022 · 123 MW · 5 29 Oct 2022 · 84 MW · 8 30 Oct 2022 · 71 MW · 12 31 Oct 2022 · 153 MW · 15 1 Nov 2022 · 1,040 MW · 47 2 Nov 2022 · 1,495 MW · 254 3 Nov 2022 · 806 MW · 89 4 Nov 2022 · 292 MW · 30 5 Nov 2022 · 79 MW · 18
28 Oct 30 Oct 1 Nov 2 Nov 3 Nov 5 Nov

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

The weather it burned in

42°high
41km/h · peak gust
9%lowest humidity

It had gone 7 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 14.3 mm on 15 Nov.

This area had burned before

47% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 4,306 ha in 2016, 855 ha in 2018, 1,762 ha in 2020, 1,415 ha in 2021. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 7,252 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 9.7% of the area of London (153 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. Mareeba where it started
    15,339 ha reached on 28 Oct
    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) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
28 Oct 40.7 °C 22 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
29 Oct 42.2 °C 20 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
30 Oct 40.3 °C 25 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
31 Oct 40.1 °C 26 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
1 Nov 39.1 °C 31 % 41 km/h 0.1 mm Extreme 53
2 Nov 40.1 °C 19 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
3 Nov 37.9 °C 19 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
4 Nov 40.0 °C 9 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
5 Nov 36.6 °C 25 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
6 Nov after 34.2 °C 34 % 34 km/h 0.1 mm Very high 41
7 Nov after 37.9 °C 21 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
8 Nov after 38.6 °C 22 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
9 Nov after 38.9 °C 20 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
10 Nov after 38.2 °C 23 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
11 Nov after 38.1 °C 24 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
12 Nov after 38.2 °C 27 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
13 Nov after 38.9 °C 24 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
14 Nov after 39.0 °C 29 % 33 km/h 0.1 mm Very high 50
15 Nov after 38.1 °C 35 % 26 km/h 14.3 mm Low 10

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 21 Oct 2022
After · 12 Nov 2022

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 3 November 2022 the air beside the fire reached 223 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 76: 5.1 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak223 µg/m³
Days over the guideline5 days
PM10340 µg/m³
Optical depth1.57
303112345678
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 · 478Every 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 Mareeba fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 28 October 2022 to 5 November 2022 (9 days). The perimeter dates it from 1 November 2022 to 5 November 2022.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 15,295 hectares (153.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Mareeba (15,339 ha, 0.3 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 42.2 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 41 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 61, 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Start date: 1 November 2022 → 28 October 2022.

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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 1 November 2022 to 5 November 2022. 478 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.