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Barkly fire, 27 May 2023 Barkly

Out · last detection 3 Jun 2023, 04:45 UTC

The fire started on 27 May 2023 in Barkly, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 8 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 34,711 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 295th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3496 with a page). Number 144 in Australia in 2023, of 1235.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Barkly · 2025Barkly · 2023Barkly · 2025Barkly · 2017

Burnt area
34,711ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
8days
27 May 2023 – 3 Jun 2023
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
27 May
2023
Heat detections
1,164
in a single hotspot: 214 MW
Danger at start
50
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
1.6GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 27 May3 Jun
3 Jun 2023

How it evolved, day by day

27 May 2023 · 2,493 MW · 305 28 May 2023 · 3,438 MW · 329 29 May 2023 · 1,325 MW · 184 30 May 2023 · 1,772 MW · 122 31 May 2023 · 960 MW · 89 1 Jun 2023 · 2,716 MW · 81 2 Jun 2023 · 107 MW · 32 3 Jun 2023 · 211 MW · 22
27 May 28 May 29 May 31 May 2 Jun

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

The weather it burned in

28°high
44km/h · peak gust
15%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

5% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,878 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 22% of the area of London (347 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. Barkly where it started
    35,050 ha reached on 27 May
    0.1 %

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)
27 May 20.5 °C 19 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
28 May 20.7 °C 22 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
29 May 23.1 °C 19 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
30 May 24.0 °C 21 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
31 May 25.6 °C 15 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
1 Jun 27.2 °C 17 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
2 Jun 28.4 °C 21 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
3 Jun 28.5 °C 27 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
4 Jun after 29.8 °C 24 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
5 Jun after 29.9 °C 26 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
6 Jun after 30.3 °C 28 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
7 Jun after 30.9 °C 28 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
8 Jun after 29.6 °C 33 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
9 Jun after 27.6 °C 27 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
10 Jun after 26.6 °C 18 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
11 Jun after 27.2 °C 13 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
12 Jun after 27.8 °C 16 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
13 Jun after 28.0 °C 17 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 20 May 2023
After · 10 Jun 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 28 May 2023 the air beside the fire reached 69 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 34: 2.3 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak69 µg/m³
Days over the guideline8 days
PM10100 µg/m³
Optical depth1.22
25262728293031123456
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 · 1,164Every 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 Barkly fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 27 May 2023 and 3 June 2023: 8 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 34,711 hectares (347.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Barkly (35,050 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 28.5 °C, humidity dropped to 15 % and gusts hit 44 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 50, 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 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; 3 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 1,164 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.