How long did the Roper Gulf fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 1 December 2019 and 15 December 2019: 15 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 18,192 hectares (181.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Roper Gulf (18,369 ha, 0.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 35.4 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 45 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 48, 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.

AU · Australia · 2019-12-01 → 2019-12-15

Roper Gulf fire, 1 December 2019 Roper Gulf

Out · last detection 15 Dec 2019, 03:41 UTC

The fire started on 1 December 2019 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 15 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 18,192 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 701th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3512 with a page). Number 181 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Roper Gulf · 2016 Roper Gulf · 2026 Roper Gulf · 2025 Roper Gulf · 2021

Burnt area: 18,192ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 15days; 1 Dec 2019 – 15 Dec 2019
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 1 Dec; 2019
Heat detections: 833; in a single hotspot: 100 MW
Danger at start: 24; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 709MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Dec15 Dec

Play back 15 Dec 2019

How it evolved, day by day

1 Dec 4 Dec 5 Dec 7 Dec 10 Dec 13 Dec

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

The weather it burned in

35°high

45km/h · peak gust

20%lowest humidity

It had gone 25 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

47% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,851 ha in 2016, 2,902 ha in 2017, 3,849 ha in 2018. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 8,562 ha that had burned before.

1,213 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 11% of the area of London (182 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

18,369 ha reached on 1 Dec

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)
1 Dec	33.0 °C	45 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	High 24
2 Dec	33.4 °C	36 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
3 Dec	34.7 °C	24 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
4 Dec	35.4 °C	20 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
5 Dec	35.3 °C	23 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
6 Dec	32.6 °C	50 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
7 Dec	32.3 °C	56 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
8 Dec	32.4 °C	58 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
9 Dec	32.6 °C	58 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
10 Dec	32.2 °C	59 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	High 23
11 Dec	32.3 °C	56 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
12 Dec	33.3 °C	56 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
13 Dec	33.3 °C	54 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
14 Dec	33.7 °C	52 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 24
15 Dec	34.7 °C	49 %	36 km/h	0.2 mm	High 28
16 Dec after	33.2 °C	58 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
17 Dec after	33.5 °C	54 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
18 Dec after	33.5 °C	58 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
19 Dec after	32.6 °C	54 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
20 Dec after	32.6 °C	57 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
21 Dec after	32.5 °C	60 %	34 km/h	0.4 mm	High 25
22 Dec after	31.2 °C	68 %	33 km/h	0.5 mm	Moderate 21
23 Dec after	32.6 °C	58 %	35 km/h	0.4 mm	High 22
24 Dec after	32.9 °C	57 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 23
25 Dec after	32.7 °C	56 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 24 Nov 2019

After · 22 Dec 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 · 833Every 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?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 1 December 2019 and 15 December 2019: 15 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 18,192 hectares (181.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Roper Gulf (18,369 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 35.4 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 45 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 48, 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

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

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

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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.
Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 833 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