How long did the Roper Gulf fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 1 October 2017 and 16 October 2017: 16 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 45,392 hectares (453.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Roper Gulf (45,933 ha, 0.2 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 36.8 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 52 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 51, 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.

AU · Australia · 2017-10-01 → 2017-10-16

Roper Gulf fire, 1 October 2017 Roper Gulf

Out · last detection 16 Oct 2017, 03:55 UTC

The fire started on 1 October 2017 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 16 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 45,392 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 197th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3496 with a page). Number 34 in Australia in 2017, of 862.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Roper Gulf · 2016 Roper Gulf · 2019 Roper Gulf · 2022 Roper Gulf · 2022

Burnt area: 45,392ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 16days; 1 Oct 2017 – 16 Oct 2017
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 1 Oct; 2017
Heat detections: 1,486; in a single hotspot: 212 MW
Danger at start: 38; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 1.0GW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Oct16 Oct

Play back 16 Oct 2017

How it evolved, day by day

1 Oct 4 Oct 6 Oct 7 Oct 10 Oct 13 Oct 16 Oct

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

37°high

52km/h · peak gust

14%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 6.1 mm on 25 Oct.

This area had burned before

1% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 340 ha in 2016.

7 ha Roper Gulf fire, August 2016 6,886 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 29% of the area of London (454 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

Roper Gulf where it started

45,933 ha reached on 29 Sept

0.2 %

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)
29 Sept	32.9 °C	41 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	High 38
30 Sept	32.9 °C	46 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
1 Oct	34.5 °C	28 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
2 Oct	33.8 °C	25 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 46
3 Oct	34.9 °C	22 %	52 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 51
4 Oct	33.9 °C	36 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 44
5 Oct	34.1 °C	41 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
6 Oct	32.6 °C	52 %	45 km/h	1.3 mm	High 22
7 Oct	32.9 °C	47 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
8 Oct	32.4 °C	53 %	39 km/h	4.6 mm	Low 8
9 Oct	31.7 °C	51 %	39 km/h	6.9 mm	Very low 5
10 Oct	32.7 °C	50 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 14
11 Oct	33.3 °C	42 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	High 21
12 Oct	34.9 °C	35 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
13 Oct	33.0 °C	49 %	36 km/h	0.6 mm	Moderate 21
14 Oct	35.8 °C	18 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 42
15 Oct	36.8 °C	21 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 44
16 Oct	31.9 °C	57 %	49 km/h	14.3 mm	Very low 5
17 Oct after	30.3 °C	53 %	38 km/h	2.3 mm	Very low 5
18 Oct after	31.6 °C	48 %	38 km/h	0.4 mm	Moderate 13
19 Oct after	32.7 °C	39 %	44 km/h	0.1 mm	Moderate 20
20 Oct after	29.1 °C	63 %	44 km/h	2.7 mm	Very low 5
21 Oct after	32.7 °C	46 %	42 km/h	1.2 mm	Low 11
22 Oct after	34.1 °C	24 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
23 Oct after	34.3 °C	14 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
24 Oct after	35.4 °C	18 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
25 Oct after	31.3 °C	58 %	44 km/h	6.1 mm	Very low 4

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 24 Sept 2017

After · 23 Oct 2017

Before After

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 · 1,486Every 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 time	Satellite	FRP (MW)	Lat	Lon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Australia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Roper Gulf fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 1 October 2017 and 16 October 2017: 16 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 45,392 hectares (453.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Roper Gulf (45,933 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 36.8 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 52 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 51, 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

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

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

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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.

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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. 1,486 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.

Where it burned