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Roper Gulf fire, 4 October 2019 Roper Gulf

Out · last detection 25 Oct 2019, 04:39 UTC

The fire started on 4 October 2019 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 22 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 104,997 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

This page is probably a fire complex, not a single fire. GWIS merges into one perimeter the fires that touch over weeks, which in large burning seasons can join dozens of separate fires. The total area is reliable; the origin and dates refer to the whole complex.

Other fire pages in the same area and on the same dates:

It is the 52th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3514 with a page). Number 24 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Roper Gulf · 2018Roper Gulf · 2018Roper Gulf · 2018Roper Gulf · 2018

Burnt area
104,997ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
22days
4 Oct 2019 – 25 Oct 2019
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
4 Oct
2019
Heat detections
4,342
in a single hotspot: 346 MW
Danger at start
65
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
2.5GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 4 Oct25 Oct
25 Oct 2019

How it evolved, day by day

4 Oct 2019 · 1 MW · 1 5 Oct 2019 · 185 MW · 32 6 Oct 2019 · 2,748 MW · 219 7 Oct 2019 · 1,196 MW · 157 8 Oct 2019 · 1,481 MW · 133 9 Oct 2019 · 1,021 MW · 118 10 Oct 2019 · 2,027 MW · 161 11 Oct 2019 · 2,555 MW · 300 12 Oct 2019 · 1,627 MW · 251 13 Oct 2019 · 2,914 MW · 306 14 Oct 2019 · 4,462 MW · 373 15 Oct 2019 · 2,640 MW · 240 16 Oct 2019 · 2,186 MW · 244 17 Oct 2019 · 2,107 MW · 291 18 Oct 2019 · 3,923 MW · 282 19 Oct 2019 · 4,127 MW · 353 20 Oct 2019 · 9,926 MW · 394 21 Oct 2019 · 9,020 MW · 249 22 Oct 2019 · 602 MW · 101 23 Oct 2019 · 272 MW · 55 24 Oct 2019 · 529 MW · 63 25 Oct 2019 · 113 MW · 19
4 Oct 8 Oct 12 Oct 16 Oct 20 Oct 24 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

40°high
58km/h · peak gust
4%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 4.5 mm on 27 Oct.

This area had burned before

56% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 9,572 ha in 2016, 10,287 ha in 2017, 48,821 ha in 2018. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 59,030 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 66% of the area of London (1,050 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
    105,045 ha reached on 4 Oct
    0.6 %

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)
4 Oct 36.1 °C 14 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
5 Oct 33.8 °C 20 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
6 Oct 35.0 °C 14 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
7 Oct 34.9 °C 14 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
8 Oct 37.2 °C 19 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
9 Oct 37.0 °C 15 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
10 Oct 37.2 °C 9 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
11 Oct 36.7 °C 4 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
12 Oct 37.1 °C 9 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
13 Oct 37.5 °C 8 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 68
14 Oct 38.2 °C 10 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
15 Oct 38.0 °C 11 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
16 Oct 38.8 °C 10 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 64
17 Oct 39.3 °C 11 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 66
18 Oct 39.5 °C 13 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 66
19 Oct 38.6 °C 18 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
20 Oct 39.2 °C 10 % 58 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 74
21 Oct 37.5 °C 8 % 57 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 73
22 Oct 35.6 °C 17 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
23 Oct 35.6 °C 21 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
24 Oct 35.9 °C 19 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
25 Oct 36.1 °C 22 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
26 Oct after 36.9 °C 22 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
27 Oct after 33.6 °C 38 % 38 km/h 4.5 mm Moderate 12

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 27 Sept 2019
After · 1 Nov 2019

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 · 4,342Every 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 4 October 2019 and 25 October 2019: 22 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 104,997 hectares (1,050.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Roper Gulf (105,045 ha, 0.6 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 39.5 °C, humidity dropped to 4 % and gusts hit 58 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 74, class Very 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 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.

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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 4,342 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.