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AU · Australia · –

East Pilbara fire, 5 June 2025 East Pilbara

Out · last detection 14 Jun 2025, 17:25 UTC

The fire started on 5 June 2025 in East Pilbara, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 10 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,629 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

This entry is probably a savanna fire in Australia’s tropical north, not a bushfire like those in the south of the country. Millions of hectares of northern savanna and grassland burn every year: much of it in burns lit on purpose early in the dry season (traditional fire management, parks and cattle stations), the rest in grass fires that return to the same ground every few years. This is our assumption, based on the location; it is not confirmed. That is why it is left out of the wildfire rankings.

Burnt area
5,629ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
10days
5 Jun 2025 – 14 Jun 2025
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
5 Jun
2025
Heat detections
218
in a single hotspot: 181 MW
Danger at start
4
Very low · FWI index
Average daily power
155MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 5 Jun14 Jun
14 Jun 2025

How it evolved, day by day

5 Jun 2025 · 1 MW · 1 6 Jun 2025 · 151 MW · 11 7 Jun 2025 · 145 MW · 35 8 Jun 2025 · 424 MW · 28 9 Jun 2025 · 301 MW · 40 10 Jun 2025 · 129 MW · 31 11 Jun 2025 · 135 MW · 29 12 Jun 2025 · 165 MW · 25 13 Jun 2025 · 100 MW · 17 14 Jun 2025 · 1 MW · 1
5 Jun 8 Jun 11 Jun 13 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

30°high
47km/h · peak gust
17%lowest humidity

It had gone 8 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

60% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 3,284 ha in 2018, 397 ha in 2023. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 3,361 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 3.6% of the area of London (56 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. East Pilbara where it started
    5,600 ha reached on 5 Jun
    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 2025
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2025, 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. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.

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)
5 Jun 27.4 °C 66 % 22 km/h 2.4 mm Very low 4
6 Jun 29.1 °C 39 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
7 Jun 29.7 °C 28 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
8 Jun 28.2 °C 25 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
9 Jun 26.0 °C 18 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
10 Jun 26.4 °C 21 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
11 Jun 27.1 °C 18 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
12 Jun 26.9 °C 19 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
13 Jun 27.4 °C 19 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
14 Jun 27.6 °C 17 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
15 Jun after 27.8 °C 19 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
16 Jun after 28.5 °C 19 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
17 Jun after 27.9 °C 18 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
18 Jun after 27.8 °C 19 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
19 Jun after 28.5 °C 18 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
20 Jun after 29.5 °C 21 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
21 Jun after 28.9 °C 26 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
22 Jun after 27.1 °C 26 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
23 Jun after 24.8 °C 21 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
24 Jun after 24.5 °C 21 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 29 May 2025
After · 21 Jun 2025

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

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 5 June 2025 the air beside the fire reached 14 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak14 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1015 µg/m³
Optical depth0.16
3 Jun6 Jun9 Jun12 Jun15 Jun
Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

Particles from the Copernicus CAMS model at the centre of the perimeter; these are not measurements in each town. The pale bar is the worst hour, the solid one the daily average.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)

Detections table · 218Every 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 East Pilbara fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 5 June 2025 and 14 June 2025: 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 5,629 hectares (56.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered East Pilbara (5,600 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 29.7 °C, humidity dropped to 17 % and gusts hit 47 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 44, 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.

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. 218 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 2025, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.
  • Probably a vegetation burn: not counted in the totals.

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.