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Broome fire, 9 June 2022 Broome

Out · last detection 18 Jun 2022, 05:47 UTC

The fire started on 9 June 2022 in Broome, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 10 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 11,828 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 817th largest in Western Australia since 2016 (of 2728 with a page). Number 151 in Australia in 2022, of 566.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Broome · 2017Broome · 2025Broome · 2018Broome · 2026

Burnt area
11,828ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
10days
9 Jun 2022 – 18 Jun 2022
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
9 Jun
2022
Heat detections
471
in a single hotspot: 151 MW
Danger at start
41
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
386MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 9 Jun18 Jun
18 Jun 2022

How it evolved, day by day

9 Jun 2022 · 500 MW · 45 10 Jun 2022 · 282 MW · 20 11 Jun 2022 · 332 MW · 58 12 Jun 2022 · 1,124 MW · 118 13 Jun 2022 · 383 MW · 69 14 Jun 2022 · 146 MW · 30 15 Jun 2022 · 107 MW · 39 16 Jun 2022 · 751 MW · 54 17 Jun 2022 · 82 MW · 16 18 Jun 2022 · 149 MW · 22
9 Jun 11 Jun 12 Jun 13 Jun 15 Jun 17 Jun

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

The weather it burned in

33°high
50km/h · peak gust
11%lowest humidity

It had gone 6 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

25% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,697 ha in 2017, 220 ha in 2018, 103 ha in 2021.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 7.5% of the area of London (118 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
    11,942 ha reached on 9 Jun
    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 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)
8 Jun 32.9 °C 22 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
9 Jun 32.0 °C 25 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
10 Jun 31.3 °C 20 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
11 Jun 30.5 °C 18 % 50 km/h 0.1 mm Very high 48
12 Jun 29.9 °C 14 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
13 Jun 31.1 °C 11 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
14 Jun 31.9 °C 11 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
15 Jun 32.1 °C 13 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
16 Jun 32.1 °C 12 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
17 Jun 31.9 °C 11 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
18 Jun 30.4 °C 15 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
19 Jun after 30.8 °C 15 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
20 Jun after 31.2 °C 16 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
21 Jun after 32.8 °C 14 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
22 Jun after 32.7 °C 13 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 71
23 Jun after 30.4 °C 12 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
24 Jun after 29.9 °C 15 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
25 Jun after 29.8 °C 14 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
26 Jun after 29.3 °C 14 % 59 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 78
27 Jun after 27.6 °C 19 % 61 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 75
28 Jun after 29.2 °C 23 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 2 Jun 2022
After · 25 Jun 2022

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 · 471Every 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 9 June 2022 and 18 June 2022: 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 11,828 hectares (118.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Broome (11,942 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 32.9 °C, humidity dropped to 11 % and gusts hit 50 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

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. 471 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.