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Roper Gulf fire, 23 July 2017 Roper Gulf

Out · last detection 29 Jul 2017, 05:16 UTC

The fire started on 23 July 2017 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 7 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,928 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 2325th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3511 with a page). Number 556 in Australia in 2017, of 862.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Roper Gulf · 2017Roper Gulf · 2026Roper Gulf · 2023

Burnt area
6,928ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
7days
23 Jul 2017 – 29 Jul 2017
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
23 Jul
2017
Heat detections
210
in a single hotspot: 39 MW
Danger at start
54
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
200MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 23 Jul29 Jul
29 Jul 2017

How it evolved, day by day

23 Jul 2017 · 16 MW · 4 24 Jul 2017 · 584 MW · 101 25 Jul 2017 · 259 MW · 51 26 Jul 2017 · 243 MW · 43 27 Jul 2017 · 97 MW · 10 29 Jul 2017 · 1 MW · 1
23 Jul 24 Jul 25 Jul 26 Jul 27 Jul 29 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

34°high
43km/h · peak gust
10%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

0% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 34 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 4.4% of the area of London (69 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
    6,968 ha reached on 23 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)
23 Jul 32.8 °C 10 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
24 Jul 33.6 °C 11 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
25 Jul 34.1 °C 24 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
26 Jul 33.3 °C 24 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
27 Jul 32.3 °C 26 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
28 Jul 32.1 °C 25 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
29 Jul 32.1 °C 27 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
30 Jul after 30.9 °C 27 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
31 Jul after 32.4 °C 26 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
1 Aug after 32.6 °C 23 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
2 Aug after 32.3 °C 23 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
3 Aug after 31.7 °C 17 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
4 Aug after 32.2 °C 25 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
5 Aug after 32.3 °C 26 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
6 Aug after 33.5 °C 19 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
7 Aug after 33.6 °C 14 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
8 Aug after 32.4 °C 9 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 16 Jul 2017
After · 5 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 · 210Every 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 23 July 2017 to 29 July 2017 (7 days). The perimeter dates it from 23 July 2017 to 27 July 2017.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,928 hectares (69.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Roper Gulf (6,968 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 34.1 °C, humidity dropped to 10 % and gusts hit 43 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 54, 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: 27 July 2017 → 29 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 23 July 2017 to 27 July 2017. 210 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.