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AU · Australia · –

East Pilbara fire, 7 July 2025 East Pilbara

Out · last detection 12 Jul 2025, 05:48 UTC

The fire started on 7 July 2025 in East Pilbara, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 7,513 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
7,513ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
6days
7 Jul 2025 – 12 Jul 2025
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
7 Jul
2025
Heat detections
226
in a single hotspot: 272 MW
Danger at start
42
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
982MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 7 Jul12 Jul
12 Jul 2025

How it evolved, day by day

7 Jul 2025 · 4,430 MW · 91 8 Jul 2025 · 241 MW · 38 9 Jul 2025 · 404 MW · 39 10 Jul 2025 · 670 MW · 38 11 Jul 2025 · 140 MW · 19 12 Jul 2025 · 5 MW · 1
7 Jul 9 Jul 11 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

27°high
53km/h · peak gust
13%lowest humidity

It had gone 40 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

26% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,934 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 4.7% of the area of London (75 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
    7,621 ha reached on 7 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 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)

Started with Very dry air: 28 % of the area in Australia

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
7 Jul 27.4 °C 13 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
8 Jul 24.9 °C 26 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
9 Jul 19.4 °C 19 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
10 Jul 19.7 °C 21 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
11 Jul 23.3 °C 20 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
12 Jul 24.8 °C 16 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
13 Jul after 27.3 °C 13 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
14 Jul after 28.9 °C 12 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
15 Jul after 21.6 °C 27 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
16 Jul after 22.6 °C 29 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
17 Jul after 23.1 °C 25 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
18 Jul after 25.4 °C 25 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
19 Jul after 26.8 °C 22 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
20 Jul after 28.2 °C 20 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
21 Jul after 26.2 °C 15 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
22 Jul after 18.6 °C 15 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 30 Jun 2025
After · 19 Jul 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 10 July 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
PM1014 µg/m³
Optical depth0.13
5 Jul7 Jul9 Jul11 Jul13 Jul
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 · 226Every 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?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 7 July 2025 to 12 July 2025 (6 days). The perimeter dates it from 7 July 2025 to 11 July 2025.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 7,513 hectares (75.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered East Pilbara (7,621 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 27.4 °C, humidity dropped to 13 % and gusts hit 53 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 52, 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 11 July 2025 → 12 July 2025.

RSS Changes to this page With cross-checks and a citable version

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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 7 July 2025 to 11 July 2025. 226 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.