How long did the Roper Gulf fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 13 July 2021 to 26 July 2021 (14 days). The perimeter dates it from 14 July 2021 to 24 July 2021.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,424 hectares (64.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Roper Gulf (6,461 ha, 0.0 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 36.0 °C, humidity dropped to 11 % and gusts hit 38 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 49, 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 · 2021-07-13 → 2021-07-26

Roper Gulf fire, 13 July 2021 Roper Gulf

Out · last detection 26 Jul 2021, 04:39 UTC

The fire started on 13 July 2021 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 14 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,424 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 2549th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3517 with a page). Number 319 in Australia in 2021, of 460.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Roper Gulf · 2026 Roper Gulf · 2017 Roper Gulf · 2018 Roper Gulf · 2023

Burnt area: 6,424ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 14days; 13 Jul 2021 – 26 Jul 2021
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 13 Jul; 2021
Heat detections: 284; in a single hotspot: 54 MW
Danger at start: 47; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 132MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 13 Jul26 Jul

Play back 26 Jul 2021

How it evolved, day by day

13 Jul 15 Jul 17 Jul 20 Jul 22 Jul 24 Jul

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

The weather it burned in

36°high

38km/h · peak gust

11%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 4.1% of the area of London (64 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

6,461 ha reached on 13 Jul

0.0 %

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	Danger (FWI)
13 Jul	31.3 °C	11 %	33 km/h	Very high 47
14 Jul	32.6 °C	29 %	23 km/h	High 38
15 Jul	33.2 °C	31 %	24 km/h	High 34
16 Jul	33.0 °C	30 %	26 km/h	High 35
17 Jul	32.3 °C	27 %	32 km/h	Very high 39
18 Jul	30.6 °C	15 %	35 km/h	Very high 44
19 Jul	30.9 °C	15 %	33 km/h	Very high 44
20 Jul	30.8 °C	14 %	36 km/h	Very high 47
21 Jul	30.6 °C	12 %	38 km/h	Very high 49
22 Jul	31.9 °C	20 %	23 km/h	Very high 42
23 Jul	34.9 °C	18 %	21 km/h	Very high 43
24 Jul	36.0 °C	15 %	27 km/h	Very high 48
25 Jul	32.3 °C	23 %	38 km/h	Very high 48
26 Jul	31.4 °C	22 %	35 km/h	Very high 46
27 Jul after	32.6 °C	21 %	25 km/h	Very high 41
28 Jul after	33.9 °C	24 %	22 km/h	Very high 41
29 Jul after	35.0 °C	23 %	24 km/h	Very high 41
30 Jul after	35.5 °C	21 %	27 km/h	Very high 44
31 Jul after	35.3 °C	21 %	26 km/h	Very high 46
1 Aug after	34.8 °C	25 %	34 km/h	Very high 46
2 Aug after	34.8 °C	21 %	28 km/h	Very high 45
3 Aug after	33.9 °C	28 %	30 km/h	Very high 44
4 Aug after	30.2 °C	18 %	41 km/h	Very high 49
5 Aug after	28.3 °C	16 %	43 km/h	Extreme 50

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 6 Jul 2021

After · 2 Aug 2021

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 · 284Every 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 13 July 2021 to 26 July 2021 (14 days). The perimeter dates it from 14 July 2021 to 24 July 2021.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,424 hectares (64.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Roper Gulf (6,461 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 36.0 °C, humidity dropped to 11 % and gusts hit 38 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 49, 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 · 2 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

26 October 2026 Last day with fire: 24 July 2021 → 26 July 2021.
26 October 2026 Start date: 14 July 2021 → 13 July 2021.

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 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?

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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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 14 July 2021 to 24 July 2021. 284 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