How long did the Barkly fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 13 October 2025 and 2 November 2025: 21 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 45,556 hectares (455.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Barkly (45,542 ha, 0.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 41.5 °C, humidity dropped to 12 % and gusts hit 44 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 57, 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 · 2025-10-13 → 2025-11-02

Barkly fire, 13 October 2025 Barkly

Out · last detection 2 Nov 2025, 03:51 UTC

The fire started on 13 October 2025 in Barkly, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 21 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 45,556 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 196th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3503 with a page). Number 73 in Australia in 2025, of 1124.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Barkly · 2023 Barkly · 2018 Barkly · 2023 Barkly · 2018

Burnt area: 45,556ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 21days; 13 Oct 2025 – 2 Nov 2025
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 13 Oct; 2025
Heat detections: 1,101; in a single hotspot: 260 MW
Danger at start: 23; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 650MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 13 Oct2 Nov

Play back 2 Nov 2025

How it evolved, day by day

13 Oct 16 Oct 19 Oct 20 Oct 22 Oct 28 Oct 31 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

42°high

44km/h · peak gust

12%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 13.3 mm on 8 Nov.

This area had burned before

47% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 7,555 ha in 2018, 17,482 ha in 2023. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 21,235 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 29% of the area of London (456 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

45,542 ha reached on 13 Oct

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.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2025

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2025, satellite-based estimate).

This is an estimate on 100 m cells, made from satellite imagery and census data: it does not mean that homes burned or that anyone was harmed. The perimeter also contains land that never burned. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.

Source: Global Human Settlement Layer (GHS-BUILT-S and GHS-POP R2023A), European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), © European Union, CC BY 4.0. Sum inside the perimeter computed by WorldFires. human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu

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)
11 Oct	34.7 °C	34 %	29 km/h	1.5 mm	High 23
12 Oct	36.2 °C	27 %	42 km/h	2.8 mm	High 27
13 Oct	34.8 °C	31 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
14 Oct	38.2 °C	23 %	41 km/h	0.5 mm	Very high 42
15 Oct	36.9 °C	25 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
16 Oct	37.0 °C	28 %	33 km/h	4.6 mm	Moderate 16
17 Oct	37.7 °C	21 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
18 Oct	39.2 °C	12 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 50
19 Oct	39.7 °C	15 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 53
20 Oct	39.6 °C	16 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 52
21 Oct	39.1 °C	16 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 51
22 Oct	41.2 °C	12 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 52
23 Oct	40.7 °C	17 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
24 Oct	41.5 °C	14 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 55
25 Oct	40.5 °C	19 %	36 km/h	0.2 mm	Extreme 55
26 Oct	40.2 °C	19 %	29 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 52
27 Oct	39.1 °C	17 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
28 Oct	37.0 °C	26 %	37 km/h	1.6 mm	High 37
29 Oct	36.9 °C	24 %	36 km/h	0.1 mm	Very high 44
30 Oct	38.9 °C	17 %	29 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
31 Oct	40.5 °C	13 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
1 Nov	41.0 °C	14 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
2 Nov	40.3 °C	19 %	36 km/h	0.9 mm	Very high 47
3 Nov after	30.4 °C	40 %	56 km/h	0.2 mm	Very high 40
4 Nov after	30.8 °C	28 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
5 Nov after	35.2 °C	11 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 56
6 Nov after	38.4 °C	15 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
7 Nov after	38.9 °C	17 %	51 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 66
8 Nov after	30.9 °C	44 %	38 km/h	13.3 mm	Low 6

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 6 Oct 2025

After · 9 Nov 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 22 October 2025 the air beside the fire reached 103 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 52: 3.5 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak103 µg/m³

Days over the guideline5 days

PM10105 µg/m³

Optical depth1.09

WHO 15

11121314151617181920212223242526272829303112345

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 · 1,101Every 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 13 October 2025 and 2 November 2025: 21 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 45,556 hectares (455.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Barkly (45,542 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 41.5 °C, humidity dropped to 12 % and gusts hit 44 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 57, 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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 1,101 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.
Built-up area and population come from the JRC Global Human Settlement Layer (epoch 2025, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.

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