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Roper Gulf fire, 2 May 2018 Roper Gulf

Out · last detection 23 May 2018, 16:37 UTC

The fire started on 2 May 2018 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 21 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 21,046 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 577th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3515 with a page). Number 131 in Australia in 2018, of 923.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Roper Gulf · 2019Roper Gulf · 2026Roper Gulf · 2021Roper Gulf · 2022

Burnt area
21,046ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
21days
2 May 2018 – 22 May 2018
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
2 May
2018
Heat detections
664
in a single hotspot: 0 MW
Danger at start
30
High · FWI index
Average daily power
371MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 2 May22 May
23 May 2018

How it evolved, day by day

2 May 2018 · 220 MW · 24 3 May 2018 · 4,111 MW · 179 4 May 2018 · 1,857 MW · 194 5 May 2018 · 461 MW · 58 6 May 2018 · 306 MW · 50 7 May 2018 · 2 MW · 1 8 May 2018 · 39 MW · 14 9 May 2018 · 109 MW · 16 10 May 2018 · 74 MW · 18 11 May 2018 · 39 MW · 11 12 May 2018 · 1 MW · 1 13 May 2018 · 7 MW · 8 14 May 2018 · 43 MW · 11 15 May 2018 · 7 MW · 3 17 May 2018 · 49 MW · 12 18 May 2018 · 94 MW · 12 19 May 2018 · 11 MW · 2 20 May 2018 · 20 MW · 7 21 May 2018 · 101 MW · 14 22 May 2018 · 68 MW · 8 23 May 2018 · 173 MW · 21
2 May 3 May 5 May 8 May 11 May 14 May 18 May 21 May

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
54km/h · peak gust
16%lowest humidity

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

This area had burned before

34% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 3,353 ha in 2016, 4,139 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 13% of the area of London (210 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
    21,032 ha
    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 area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable 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)
2 May 33.0 °C 33 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
3 May 33.7 °C 30 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
4 May 33.6 °C 32 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
5 May 32.8 °C 36 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
6 May 32.6 °C 27 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
7 May 31.7 °C 39 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
8 May 33.2 °C 31 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
9 May 32.6 °C 32 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
10 May 32.6 °C 32 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
11 May 31.4 °C 21 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
12 May 28.4 °C 24 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
13 May 28.2 °C 22 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
14 May 28.1 °C 21 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
15 May 28.3 °C 18 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
16 May 27.8 °C 16 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
17 May 27.9 °C 20 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
18 May 28.7 °C 29 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
19 May 28.6 °C 26 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
20 May 30.7 °C 30 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
21 May 31.2 °C 33 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
22 May 30.0 °C 25 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
23 May after 29.7 °C 24 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
24 May after 31.7 °C 33 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
25 May after 32.0 °C 34 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
26 May after 32.1 °C 34 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
27 May after 31.1 °C 38 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
28 May after 31.1 °C 31 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
29 May after 30.8 °C 29 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
30 May after 30.2 °C 33 % 59 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
31 May after 30.9 °C 32 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
1 Jun after 30.1 °C 33 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 36

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 25 Apr 2018
After · 29 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 · 0Every 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 May 2018 and 22 May 2018: 21 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 21,046 hectares (210.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Roper Gulf (21,032 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 33.7 °C, humidity dropped to 16 % and gusts hit 54 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 45, 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 · 4 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 25 May 2018 → 22 May 2018.
  2. Start date: 30 April 2018 → 2 May 2018.
  3. Last day with fire: 22 May 2018 → 25 May 2018.
  4. Start date: 2 May 2018 → 30 April 2018.

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
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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. No 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.