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Roper Gulf fire, 2 July 2016 Roper Gulf

Out · last detection 12 Jul 2016, 04:39 UTC

The fire started on 2 July 2016 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 11 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 8,347 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1833th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3503 with a page). Number 202 in Australia in 2016, of 427.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Roper Gulf · 2024Roper Gulf · 2024Roper Gulf · 2026Roper Gulf · 2017

Burnt area
8,347ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
11days
2 Jul 2016 – 12 Jul 2016
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
2 Jul
2016
Heat detections
282
in a single hotspot: 109 MW
Danger at start
52
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
162MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 2 Jul12 Jul
12 Jul 2016

How it evolved, day by day

2 Jul 2016 · 30 MW · 10 3 Jul 2016 · 9 MW · 5 4 Jul 2016 · 135 MW · 13 5 Jul 2016 · 299 MW · 48 6 Jul 2016 · 500 MW · 87 7 Jul 2016 · 245 MW · 52 8 Jul 2016 · 480 MW · 46 9 Jul 2016 · 38 MW · 13 10 Jul 2016 · 18 MW · 5 11 Jul 2016 · 4 MW · 1 12 Jul 2016 · 22 MW · 2
2 Jul 4 Jul 6 Jul 8 Jul 10 Jul 12 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

33°high
42km/h · peak gust
12%lowest humidity

It had gone 52 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 5.3% of the area of London (83 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. Roper Gulf where it started
    8,434 ha reached on 2 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 2015
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2015, 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)
2 Jul 28.2 °C 20 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
3 Jul 28.2 °C 24 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
4 Jul 29.4 °C 20 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
5 Jul 30.8 °C 18 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
6 Jul 28.3 °C 25 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
7 Jul 27.5 °C 23 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
8 Jul 29.8 °C 13 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
9 Jul 31.4 °C 12 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
10 Jul 32.7 °C 22 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
11 Jul 31.7 °C 28 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
12 Jul 31.7 °C 33 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
13 Jul after 24.7 °C 34 % 52 km/h 0.8 mm High 38
14 Jul after 20.5 °C 50 % 43 km/h 0.1 mm High 30
15 Jul after 22.4 °C 39 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
16 Jul after 23.5 °C 31 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
17 Jul after 24.4 °C 30 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
18 Jul after 25.4 °C 33 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
19 Jul after 28.2 °C 26 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
20 Jul after 29.9 °C 23 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
21 Jul after 31.7 °C 31 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
22 Jul after 33.5 °C 30 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 34

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 25 Jun 2016
After · 19 Jul 2016

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 · 282Every 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 Roper Gulf fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 2 July 2016 and 12 July 2016: 11 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 8,347 hectares (83.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Roper Gulf (8,434 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 32.7 °C, humidity dropped to 12 % and gusts hit 42 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 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. 282 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 2015, 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.