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Broome fire, 16 October 2018 Broome

Out · last detection 25 Oct 2018, 05:22 UTC

The fire started on 16 October 2018 in Broome, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 10 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 18,919 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 388th largest in Western Australia since 2016 (of 2728 with a page). Number 157 in Australia in 2018, of 924.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Broome · 2023Broome · 2025Broome · 2026Broome · 2023

Burnt area
18,919ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
10days
16 Oct 2018 – 25 Oct 2018
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
16 Oct
2018
Heat detections
651
in a single hotspot: 255 MW
Danger at start
81
Very extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
2.3GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 16 Oct25 Oct
25 Oct 2018

How it evolved, day by day

16 Oct 2018 · 5,102 MW · 176 17 Oct 2018 · 11,486 MW · 309 18 Oct 2018 · 3,345 MW · 67 19 Oct 2018 · 317 MW · 19 20 Oct 2018 · 620 MW · 7 21 Oct 2018 · 1,526 MW · 42 22 Oct 2018 · 130 MW · 14 23 Oct 2018 · 98 MW · 5 24 Oct 2018 · 7 MW · 2 25 Oct 2018 · 58 MW · 10
16 Oct 17 Oct 18 Oct 20 Oct 22 Oct 24 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

41°high
53km/h · peak gust
7%lowest humidity

It had gone 5 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.2 mm on 3 Nov.

This area had burned before

7% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 904 ha in 2016, 380 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 12% of the area of London (189 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
    19,045 ha reached on 16 Oct
    0.4 %

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 area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable 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)
16 Oct 38.3 °C 7 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 81
17 Oct 40.6 °C 7 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 78
18 Oct 36.2 °C 21 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 72
19 Oct 36.4 °C 29 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
20 Oct 38.3 °C 17 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 64
21 Oct 38.9 °C 15 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
22 Oct 39.6 °C 16 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 69
23 Oct 40.0 °C 13 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 74
24 Oct 39.0 °C 19 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 80
25 Oct 34.1 °C 32 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
26 Oct after 33.2 °C 30 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
27 Oct after 35.3 °C 25 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
28 Oct after 37.3 °C 22 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
29 Oct after 39.1 °C 20 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
30 Oct after 41.0 °C 14 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 67
31 Oct after 37.6 °C 25 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
1 Nov after 38.7 °C 29 % 42 km/h 0.3 mm Extreme 57
2 Nov after 39.1 °C 26 % 45 km/h 0.2 mm Extreme 60
3 Nov after 38.4 °C 30 % 40 km/h 1.2 mm Very high 42

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 9 Oct 2018
After · 1 Nov 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 · 651Every 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 16 October 2018 and 25 October 2018: 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 18,919 hectares (189.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Broome (19,045 ha, 0.4 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 40.6 °C, humidity dropped to 7 % and gusts hit 53 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 81, class Very 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.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 651 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.