How long did the Barkly fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 28 January 2025 and 30 January 2025: 3 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 8,477 hectares (84.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Barkly (8,571 ha, 0.0 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 43.3 °C, humidity dropped to 17 % and gusts hit 47 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 70, 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.

AU · Australia · 2025-01-28 → 2025-01-30

Barkly fire, 28 January 2025 Barkly

Out · last detection 29 Jan 2025, 16:33 UTC

The fire started on 28 January 2025 in Barkly, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 8,477 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1802th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3496 with a page). Number 595 in Australia in 2025, of 1124.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Barkly · 2021 Barkly · 2023 Barkly · 2017 Barkly · 2023

Burnt area: 8,477ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 3days; 28 Jan 2025 – 30 Jan 2025
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 28 Jan; 2025
Heat detections: 240; in a single hotspot: 214 MW
Danger at start: 54; Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power: 2.7GW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 28 Jan30 Jan

Play back 29 Jan 2025

How it evolved, day by day

28 Jan 29 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

43°high

47km/h · peak gust

17%lowest humidity

It had gone 52 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 14.1 mm on 6 Feb.

This area had burned before

59% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 20 ha in 2017, 4,894 ha in 2021, 104 ha in 2023.

2,443 ha Barkly fire, October 2021 7,704 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 5.4% of the area of London (85 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

Barkly where it started

8,571 ha reached on 28 Jan

0.0 %

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 Jan	39.9 °C	25 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
29 Jan	41.3 °C	22 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 58
30 Jan	43.3 °C	17 %	47 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 70
31 Jan after	42.3 °C	17 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 68
1 Feb after	42.7 °C	13 %	53 km/h	0.0 mm	Very extreme 76
2 Feb after	39.6 °C	25 %	55 km/h	0.9 mm	Extreme 65
3 Feb after	30.6 °C	50 %	50 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 41
4 Feb after	33.2 °C	47 %	40 km/h	0.4 mm	Very high 40
5 Feb after	37.5 °C	33 %	31 km/h	0.7 mm	Very high 39
6 Feb after	33.7 °C	53 %	23 km/h	14.1 mm	Very low 4

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 21 Jan 2025

After · 6 Feb 2025

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.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 29 January 2025 the air beside the fire reached 40 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak40 µg/m³

Days over the guideline0 days

PM1041 µg/m³

Optical depth0.35

WHO 15

26272829303112

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 · 240Every 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 Barkly fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 28 January 2025 and 30 January 2025: 3 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 8,477 hectares (84.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Barkly (8,571 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 43.3 °C, humidity dropped to 17 % and gusts hit 47 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 70, 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

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. 240 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