How long did the Roper Gulf fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 11 October 2019 to 28 October 2019 (18 days). The perimeter dates it from 11 October 2019 to 27 October 2019.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 78,776 hectares (787.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire entered 2 municipalities: Roper Gulf (73,761 ha, 0.4 %); West Arnhem (4,829 ha, 0.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 39.6 °C, humidity dropped to 6 % and gusts hit 59 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 71, 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.

AU · Australia · 2019-10-11 → 2019-10-28

Roper Gulf fire, 11 October 2019 Roper Gulf, West Arnhem

Out · last detection 28 Oct 2019, 05:23 UTC

The fire started on 11 October 2019 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 18 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 78,776 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 89th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3521 with a page). Number 33 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Roper Gulf · 2023 Roper Gulf · 2019 West Arnhem · 2016 West Arnhem · 2023

Burnt area: 78,776ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 18days; 11 Oct 2019 – 28 Oct 2019
Municipalities hit: 2; local government areas
Started on: 11 Oct; 2019
Heat detections: 3,407; in a single hotspot: 401 MW
Danger at start: 54; Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power: 2.3GW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 11 Oct28 Oct

Play back 28 Oct 2019

How it evolved, day by day

11 Oct 14 Oct 17 Oct 20 Oct 21 Oct 23 Oct 26 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

59km/h · peak gust

6%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.3 mm on 29 Oct.

This area had burned before

47% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 14,473 ha in 2016, 3,180 ha in 2017, 27,910 ha in 2018. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 36,813 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 50% of the area of London (788 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

73,761 ha reached on 11 Oct

0.4 %
West Arnhem

4,829 ha reached on 21 Oct

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)
11 Oct	37.0 °C	10 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
12 Oct	37.7 °C	6 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 56
13 Oct	37.5 °C	11 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 59
14 Oct	38.0 °C	14 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 56
15 Oct	37.7 °C	16 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 52
16 Oct	38.5 °C	14 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 55
17 Oct	38.9 °C	16 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
18 Oct	39.6 °C	17 %	47 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 64
19 Oct	39.1 °C	19 %	50 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 62
20 Oct	39.4 °C	12 %	59 km/h	0.0 mm	Very extreme 71
21 Oct	37.8 °C	11 %	52 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 66
22 Oct	36.3 °C	23 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
23 Oct	35.3 °C	26 %	46 km/h	0.1 mm	Extreme 50
24 Oct	36.5 °C	24 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 46
25 Oct	37.6 °C	22 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
26 Oct	36.9 °C	25 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 51
27 Oct	35.6 °C	33 %	42 km/h	0.2 mm	Very high 44
28 Oct	34.0 °C	38 %	37 km/h	4.8 mm	Low 9
29 Oct after	32.9 °C	35 %	34 km/h	1.3 mm	Moderate 20

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 4 Oct 2019

After · 4 Nov 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 · 3,407Every 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 11 October 2019 to 28 October 2019 (18 days). The perimeter dates it from 11 October 2019 to 27 October 2019.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 78,776 hectares (787.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire entered 2 municipalities: Roper Gulf (73,761 ha, 0.4 %); West Arnhem (4,829 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 39.6 °C, humidity dropped to 6 % and gusts hit 59 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 71, 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

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 Last day with fire: 27 October 2019 → 28 October 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.

Report an error

What do you think is wrong?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

What really happened?

Your connection to the fire (optional) Email (optional)

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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 11 October 2019 to 27 October 2019. 3,407 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