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Broome fire, 2 October 2018 Broome

Out · last detection 9 Oct 2018, 05:23 UTC

The fire started on 2 October 2018 in Broome, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 8 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 8,412 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1322th largest in Western Australia since 2016 (of 2718 with a page). Number 488 in Australia in 2018, of 923.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Broome · 2022Broome · 2021Broome · 2025Broome · 2025

Burnt area
8,412ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
8days
2 Oct 2018 – 9 Oct 2018
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
2 Oct
2018
Heat detections
330
in a single hotspot: 181 MW
Danger at start
31
High · FWI index
Average daily power
1.1GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 2 Oct9 Oct
9 Oct 2018

How it evolved, day by day

2 Oct 2018 · 313 MW · 20 3 Oct 2018 · 1,999 MW · 47 4 Oct 2018 · 852 MW · 47 5 Oct 2018 · 3,438 MW · 65 6 Oct 2018 · 244 MW · 24 7 Oct 2018 · 1,194 MW · 74 8 Oct 2018 · 405 MW · 19 9 Oct 2018 · 31 MW · 4
2 Oct 4 Oct 5 Oct 6 Oct 8 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

35°high
41km/h · peak gust
22%lowest humidity

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

This area had burned before

2% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 176 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 5.3% of the area of London (84 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
    8,273 ha reached on 1 Oct
    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 2020
Built-up area0.13 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.13 hectares of built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2020, 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)
1 Oct 30.9 °C 42 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
2 Oct 30.9 °C 49 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
3 Oct 31.0 °C 50 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
4 Oct 31.2 °C 44 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
5 Oct 31.2 °C 53 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
6 Oct 32.1 °C 45 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
7 Oct 32.9 °C 41 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
8 Oct 32.8 °C 42 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
9 Oct 31.9 °C 43 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
10 Oct after 29.8 °C 61 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
11 Oct after 29.9 °C 60 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
12 Oct after 31.3 °C 53 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
13 Oct after 32.3 °C 44 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
14 Oct after 32.8 °C 42 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
15 Oct after 32.2 °C 40 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
16 Oct after 34.6 °C 22 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
17 Oct after 35.3 °C 22 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
18 Oct after 30.0 °C 64 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
19 Oct after 30.2 °C 60 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
20 Oct after 31.8 °C 47 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
21 Oct after 33.9 °C 41 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
22 Oct after 33.5 °C 45 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
23 Oct after 31.8 °C 55 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
24 Oct after 31.2 °C 55 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
25 Oct after 30.8 °C 55 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
26 Oct after 30.8 °C 49 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 31

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 25 Sept 2018
After · 16 Oct 2018

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 · 330Every 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 2 October 2018 and 9 October 2018: 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 8,412 hectares (84.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Broome (8,273 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 34.6 °C, humidity dropped to 22 % and gusts hit 41 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 45, 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
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.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 330 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 2020, 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.