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Burke fire, July 2020 Burke, Roper Gulf

Out · last detection 18 Jul 2020, 04:31 UTC

The fire started on 6 July 2020 in Burke, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 9,277 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 835th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 120 in Australia in 2020, of 320.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Burke · 2025Roper Gulf · 2022Roper Gulf · 2022Roper Gulf · 2025

Burnt area
9,277ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
12days
6 Jul 2020 – 17 Jul 2020
Municipalities hit
2
local government areas
Started on
6 Jul
2020
Heat detections
280
in a single hotspot: 83 MW
Danger at start
47
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
202MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 6 Jul17 Jul
18 Jul 2020

How it evolved, day by day

6 Jul 2020 · 297 MW · 34 7 Jul 2020 · 278 MW · 22 8 Jul 2020 · 78 MW · 11 10 Jul 2020 · 161 MW · 15 12 Jul 2020 · 312 MW · 57 13 Jul 2020 · 206 MW · 43 14 Jul 2020 · 136 MW · 29 15 Jul 2020 · 52 MW · 17 16 Jul 2020 · 195 MW · 20 17 Jul 2020 · 501 MW · 30 18 Jul 2020 · 2 MW · 1
6 Jul 8 Jul 12 Jul 14 Jul 16 Jul 17 Jul 18 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
54km/h · peak gust
13%lowest humidity

It had gone 43 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

8% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 497 ha in 2016, 284 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 5.9% of the area of London (93 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. Burke where it started
    7,667 ha reached on 6 Jul
    0.2 %
  2. Roper Gulf
    1,617 ha reached on 6 Jul
    0.0 %

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)
6 Jul 26.5 °C 20 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
7 Jul 27.8 °C 21 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
8 Jul 27.9 °C 29 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
9 Jul 27.9 °C 35 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
10 Jul 29.8 °C 34 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
11 Jul 30.8 °C 31 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
12 Jul 28.3 °C 17 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
13 Jul 25.6 °C 13 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
14 Jul 26.3 °C 19 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
15 Jul 27.7 °C 17 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
16 Jul 28.0 °C 15 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
17 Jul 28.8 °C 18 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
18 Jul after 28.9 °C 17 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
19 Jul after 29.4 °C 16 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
20 Jul after 29.7 °C 14 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
21 Jul after 30.1 °C 17 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
22 Jul after 29.3 °C 23 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
23 Jul after 29.0 °C 25 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
24 Jul after 29.2 °C 27 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
25 Jul after 30.0 °C 24 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
26 Jul after 29.0 °C 19 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
27 Jul after 28.1 °C 13 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
28 Jul after 27.1 °C 14 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
29 Jul after 27.0 °C 13 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
30 Jul after 28.0 °C 18 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
31 Jul after 27.3 °C 26 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 29 Jun 2020
After · 24 Jul 2020

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 · 280Every 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 Burke fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 6 July 2020 and 17 July 2020: 12 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 9,277 hectares (92.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Burke (7,667 ha, 0.2 %); Roper Gulf (1,617 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 30.8 °C, humidity dropped to 13 % and gusts hit 54 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 58, 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. 280 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.