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Roper Gulf fire, 19 July 2017 Roper Gulf

Out · last detection 27 Jul 2017, 04:13 UTC

The fire started on 19 July 2017 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 11,812 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1197th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3508 with a page). Number 261 in Australia in 2017, of 862.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Roper Gulf · 2026Roper Gulf · 2023Roper Gulf · 2023Roper Gulf · 2023

Burnt area
11,812ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
9days
19 Jul 2017 – 27 Jul 2017
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
19 Jul
2017
Heat detections
423
in a single hotspot: 123 MW
Danger at start
50
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
431MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 19 Jul27 Jul
27 Jul 2017

How it evolved, day by day

19 Jul 2017 · 32 MW · 3 20 Jul 2017 · 34 MW · 16 21 Jul 2017 · 53 MW · 22 22 Jul 2017 · 482 MW · 37 23 Jul 2017 · 368 MW · 38 24 Jul 2017 · 1,120 MW · 133 25 Jul 2017 · 1,334 MW · 107 26 Jul 2017 · 434 MW · 65 27 Jul 2017 · 19 MW · 2
19 Jul 21 Jul 23 Jul 25 Jul 27 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
11%lowest humidity

It had gone 59 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

0% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 11 ha in 2016.

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. Roper Gulf where it started
    11,942 ha reached on 19 Jul
    0.1 %

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)
19 Jul 32.0 °C 14 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
20 Jul 29.2 °C 11 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
21 Jul 30.3 °C 12 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
22 Jul 31.6 °C 12 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
23 Jul 31.8 °C 12 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
24 Jul 33.0 °C 12 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
25 Jul 33.3 °C 21 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
26 Jul 32.4 °C 23 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
27 Jul 31.3 °C 24 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
28 Jul after 31.6 °C 22 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
29 Jul after 31.5 °C 23 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
30 Jul after 30.8 °C 28 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
31 Jul after 31.1 °C 28 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
1 Aug after 31.9 °C 22 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
2 Aug after 31.8 °C 27 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
3 Aug after 31.3 °C 20 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
4 Aug after 30.9 °C 22 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
5 Aug after 31.1 °C 20 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
6 Aug after 32.3 °C 16 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 12 Jul 2017
After · 3 Aug 2017

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 · 423Every 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?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 19 July 2017 to 27 July 2017 (9 days). The perimeter dates it from 19 July 2017 to 26 July 2017.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 11,812 hectares (118.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Roper Gulf (11,942 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 33.3 °C, humidity dropped to 11 % and gusts hit 42 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 50, 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 26 July 2017 → 27 July 2017.

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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 19 July 2017 to 26 July 2017. 423 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.