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Broome fire, 12 July 2017 Broome

Out · last detection 21 Jul 2017, 06:06 UTC

The fire started on 12 July 2017 in Broome, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 10 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 9,206 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1171th largest in Western Australia since 2016 (of 2718 with a page). Number 376 in Australia in 2017, of 862.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Broome · 2024Broome · 2018Broome · 2024Broome · 2018

Burnt area
9,206ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
10days
12 Jul 2017 – 21 Jul 2017
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
12 Jul
2017
Heat detections
310
in a single hotspot: 86 MW
Danger at start
34
High · FWI index
Average daily power
430MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 12 Jul21 Jul
21 Jul 2017

How it evolved, day by day

12 Jul 2017 · 1,063 MW · 91 13 Jul 2017 · 1,311 MW · 82 14 Jul 2017 · 73 MW · 17 15 Jul 2017 · 183 MW · 32 16 Jul 2017 · 533 MW · 29 17 Jul 2017 · 208 MW · 25 18 Jul 2017 · 358 MW · 22 19 Jul 2017 · 138 MW · 11 21 Jul 2017 · 3 MW · 1
12 Jul 13 Jul 14 Jul 16 Jul 18 Jul 21 Jul

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

The weather it burned in

31°high
46km/h · peak gust
23%lowest humidity

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

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 5.8% of the area of London (92 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. Broome where it started
    9,220 ha reached on 12 Jul
    0.2 %

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 2015
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2015, 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.

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)
12 Jul 29.6 °C 42 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
13 Jul 30.8 °C 36 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
14 Jul 30.1 °C 33 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
15 Jul 28.5 °C 25 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
16 Jul 28.4 °C 23 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
17 Jul 29.4 °C 26 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
18 Jul 29.6 °C 23 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
19 Jul 29.4 °C 25 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
20 Jul 28.8 °C 26 % 20 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
21 Jul 28.1 °C 36 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
22 Jul after 27.1 °C 50 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
23 Jul after 28.4 °C 34 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
24 Jul after 29.5 °C 23 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
25 Jul after 29.7 °C 19 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
26 Jul after 30.6 °C 20 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
27 Jul after 31.2 °C 25 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
28 Jul after 29.7 °C 35 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
29 Jul after 28.0 °C 54 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
30 Jul after 28.7 °C 36 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
31 Jul after 29.0 °C 23 % 46 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 · 5 Jul 2017
After · 28 Jul 2017

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

Detections table · 310Every 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 Broome fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 12 July 2017 and 21 July 2017: 10 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 9,206 hectares (92.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Broome (9,220 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 30.8 °C, humidity dropped to 23 % and gusts hit 46 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 47, class Very high.
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
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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. 310 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 2015, 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.