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Roper Gulf fire, 15 April 2018 Roper Gulf

Out · last detection 27 Apr 2018, 05:16 UTC

The fire started on 15 April 2018 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 14,063 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 977th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3496 with a page). Number 230 in Australia in 2018, of 923.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Katherine · 2019Roper Gulf · 2019Victoria Daly · 2016

Burnt area
14,063ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
12days
15 Apr 2018 – 26 Apr 2018
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
15 Apr
2018
Heat detections
476
in a single hotspot: 338 MW
Danger at start
25
High · FWI index
Average daily power
302MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 15 Apr26 Apr
27 Apr 2018

How it evolved, day by day

15 Apr 2018 · 187 MW · 10 16 Apr 2018 · 25 MW · 8 17 Apr 2018 · 37 MW · 6 18 Apr 2018 · 1,809 MW · 95 19 Apr 2018 · 287 MW · 33 20 Apr 2018 · 430 MW · 72 21 Apr 2018 · 291 MW · 57 22 Apr 2018 · 262 MW · 62 23 Apr 2018 · 161 MW · 40 24 Apr 2018 · 309 MW · 31 25 Apr 2018 · 90 MW · 18 26 Apr 2018 · 40 MW · 7 27 Apr 2018 · 4 MW · 1
15 Apr 17 Apr 18 Apr 19 Apr 21 Apr 23 Apr 25 Apr 27 Apr

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

The weather it burned in

36°high
49km/h · peak gust
20%lowest humidity

It had gone 12 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

49% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 6,119 ha in 2016, 859 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 8.9% of the area of London (141 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
    14,072 ha reached on 15 Apr
    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 2020
Built-up area0.10 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.10 hectares of built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2020, 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)
12 Apr 35.1 °C 41 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
13 Apr 34.1 °C 42 % 27 km/h 0.1 mm High 26
14 Apr 35.4 °C 35 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
15 Apr 36.2 °C 29 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
16 Apr 35.5 °C 23 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
17 Apr 35.6 °C 28 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
18 Apr 34.8 °C 45 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
19 Apr 35.4 °C 41 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
20 Apr 35.4 °C 29 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
21 Apr 35.2 °C 30 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
22 Apr 35.0 °C 30 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
23 Apr 34.1 °C 32 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
24 Apr 33.5 °C 29 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
25 Apr 33.0 °C 29 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
26 Apr 33.6 °C 24 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
27 Apr after 33.3 °C 26 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
28 Apr after 33.3 °C 20 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
29 Apr after 32.7 °C 24 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
30 Apr after 32.3 °C 32 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
1 May after 33.1 °C 34 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
2 May after 33.7 °C 31 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
3 May after 33.8 °C 33 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
4 May after 34.7 °C 27 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
5 May after 33.2 °C 32 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
6 May after 33.0 °C 26 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
7 May after 33.1 °C 25 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
8 May after 33.2 °C 30 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
9 May after 32.7 °C 26 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
10 May after 33.1 °C 27 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 8 Apr 2018
After · 3 May 2018

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 · 476Every 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 15 April 2018 and 26 April 2018: 12 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 14,063 hectares (140.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Roper Gulf (14,072 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 36.2 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 49 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 46, 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 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.

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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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 476 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 2020, 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.