How long did the Roper Gulf fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 27 May 2019 to 10 June 2019 (15 days). The perimeter dates it from 29 May 2019 to 10 June 2019.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 16,610 hectares (166.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Roper Gulf (16,771 ha, 0.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 31.6 °C, humidity dropped to 18 % and gusts hit 55 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 50, 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 · 2019-05-27 → 2019-06-10

Roper Gulf fire, 27 May 2019 Roper Gulf

Out · last detection 10 Jun 2019, 04:07 UTC

The fire started on 27 May 2019 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 15 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 16,610 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 802th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3518 with a page). Number 206 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Roper Gulf · 2016 Roper Gulf · 2026 Roper Gulf · 2019 Roper Gulf · 2021

Burnt area: 16,610ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 15days; 27 May 2019 – 10 Jun 2019
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 27 May; 2019
Heat detections: 579; in a single hotspot: 106 MW
Danger at start: 38; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 332MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 27 May10 Jun

Play back 10 Jun 2019

How it evolved, day by day

27 May 29 May 31 May 2 Jun 4 Jun 7 Jun 9 Jun

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

The weather it burned in

32°high

55km/h · peak gust

18%lowest humidity

It had gone 23 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

46% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 5,306 ha in 2016, 3,389 ha in 2017, 311 ha in 2018. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 7,621 ha that had burned before.

3,695 ha Roper Gulf fire, December 2016 10,877 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 10% of the area of London (166 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

16,771 ha reached on 27 May

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)
27 May	31.6 °C	26 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
28 May	29.5 °C	28 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
29 May	29.6 °C	26 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
30 May	27.1 °C	24 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
31 May	27.0 °C	26 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
1 Jun	26.6 °C	27 %	47 km/h	0.4 mm	Very high 42
2 Jun	27.4 °C	19 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 44
3 Jun	26.9 °C	18 %	53 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
4 Jun	24.1 °C	19 %	55 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 50
5 Jun	23.0 °C	19 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
6 Jun	24.1 °C	18 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
7 Jun	24.9 °C	24 %	36 km/h	0.5 mm	Very high 40
8 Jun	27.5 °C	50 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
9 Jun	29.7 °C	47 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	High 29
10 Jun	31.2 °C	42 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	High 29
11 Jun after	30.5 °C	50 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
12 Jun after	32.2 °C	37 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
13 Jun after	31.6 °C	34 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 29
14 Jun after	32.2 °C	31 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
15 Jun after	31.6 °C	33 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
16 Jun after	32.0 °C	29 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
17 Jun after	30.7 °C	26 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
18 Jun after	28.3 °C	16 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
19 Jun after	27.2 °C	21 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
20 Jun after	28.1 °C	22 %	36 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 · 20 May 2019

After · 17 Jun 2019

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 · 579Every 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?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 27 May 2019 to 10 June 2019 (15 days). The perimeter dates it from 29 May 2019 to 10 June 2019.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 16,610 hectares (166.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Roper Gulf (16,771 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 31.6 °C, humidity dropped to 18 % and gusts hit 55 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 50, 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

26 October 2026 Start date: 29 May 2019 → 27 May 2019.

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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What really happened?

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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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 29 May 2019 to 10 June 2019. 579 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.

Where it burned