AURSEEAursee · fire file
Fire near Aurukun, Australia, 10 October 2026
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What the satellites saw
Every pixel VIIRS returned inside 24 km of this fire: 220 in daylight, 54 on the night pass. A pixel is 375 m, so the squares are drawn at the size the measurement has.
Where
- Active fire
52 - Burned before
51 - Lightning first
none here - Near a road
35
Coastline and borders from Natural Earth at 110 m — regional context, not a survey. Each layer above is its own address, so a view can be shared.
A fire was first detected here at 15:16 UTC on 10 October 2026, 44 km SE of Aurukun in Queensland, Australia. At its most recent pass it was putting out 3,744 megawatts of radiative power across 274 separate satellite detections.
The detections span about 19.8 km of ground.
No settlement in our index has population recorded within 25 km.
When the satellite first saw it
In local solar time the first detection falls at 00:44, which is the dead of night. VIIRS passes about 01:30 and 13:30 local solar, so this is when the satellite looked: the fire began somewhere in the twelve hours before.
It was seen across 13.9 hours of satellite passes.
20% of the detections came from the night pass.
What this ground has done before
This ground has burned before. Our archive records fire here in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2025, across 41 days, most recently on 2025-08-17.
Wind and weather
At the fire, wind was 6 km/h from the ENE, carrying smoke and embers towards the WSW. Temperature 22°C, relative humidity 79%.
Twelve hours on, the forecast has wind at 12 km/h from the E. These are model figures at roughly 10 km resolution, not a reading taken at the fire.
How it compares
By radiative power this is the 40th largest fire burning anywhere on Earth in the current window.
Where analysis would go
Our screening pass scores this fire 0.90. The score ranks where analysis is worth spending.
What the screen noticed: 8 distinct events in one space-time group; activity compressed 14x versus a week-long release; 62% of events first seen at night (local solar), when machinery is not working; events spread over 6 km - too far apart to be one fire, close enough to share an actor; 34 detections per event - large spreading fires, not many ignitions.
Read from satellite detections and weather. No roads, no land cover, no ground visit.
What else this page knows
Each of these is attached to every fire, including this one.
A detection is a heat signature at 375 m, about three hours behind the satellite. Cloud, smoke and canopy hide fires; each satellite passes twice a day. Not for evacuation or life-safety decisions — follow your local fire service.
Written from our own measurements; composed. Open this fire on the live map.