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Roper Gulf fire, 10 August 2022 Roper Gulf

Out · last detection 22 Aug 2022, 05:29 UTC

The fire started on 10 August 2022 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 13 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 14,697 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 932th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3508 with a page). Number 110 in Australia in 2022, of 566.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Roper Gulf · 2018Roper Gulf · 2025Roper Gulf · 2024Roper Gulf · 2023

Burnt area
14,697ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
13days
10 Aug 2022 – 22 Aug 2022
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
10 Aug
2022
Heat detections
478
in a single hotspot: 80 MW
Danger at start
48
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
296MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 10 Aug22 Aug
22 Aug 2022

How it evolved, day by day

11 Aug 2022 · 16 MW · 4 12 Aug 2022 · 520 MW · 83 13 Aug 2022 · 296 MW · 66 14 Aug 2022 · 1,199 MW · 77 15 Aug 2022 · 389 MW · 50 16 Aug 2022 · 295 MW · 33 17 Aug 2022 · 293 MW · 58 18 Aug 2022 · 233 MW · 37 19 Aug 2022 · 106 MW · 22 20 Aug 2022 · 88 MW · 22 21 Aug 2022 · 92 MW · 20 22 Aug 2022 · 31 MW · 6
11 Aug 13 Aug 14 Aug 15 Aug 17 Aug 19 Aug 21 Aug

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

The weather it burned in

33°high
48km/h · peak gust
6%lowest humidity

It had gone 38 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

62% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 3,479 ha in 2017, 4,793 ha in 2018, 1,006 ha in 2019, 1,849 ha in 2020. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 9,179 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 9.3% of the area of London (147 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
    14,807 ha reached on 11 Aug
    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)
10 Aug 32.5 °C 21 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
11 Aug 31.7 °C 34 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
12 Aug 33.0 °C 25 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
13 Aug 31.6 °C 26 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
14 Aug 31.3 °C 10 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
15 Aug 30.6 °C 6 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
16 Aug 31.7 °C 7 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
17 Aug 30.6 °C 8 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
18 Aug 31.2 °C 11 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
19 Aug 31.9 °C 16 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
20 Aug 31.7 °C 12 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
21 Aug 31.6 °C 12 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 63
22 Aug 33.0 °C 13 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
23 Aug after 34.3 °C 10 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 64
24 Aug after 27.4 °C 12 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 69
25 Aug after 27.9 °C 9 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 65
26 Aug after 31.0 °C 12 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
27 Aug after 32.7 °C 24 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
28 Aug after 34.9 °C 28 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
29 Aug after 32.2 °C 46 % 43 km/h 0.4 mm High 36
30 Aug after 34.4 °C 34 % 44 km/h 0.3 mm Very high 40
31 Aug after 33.3 °C 37 % 47 km/h 0.3 mm Very high 39
1 Sept after 35.7 °C 28 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 3 Aug 2022
After · 29 Aug 2022

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 11 August 2022 the air beside the fire reached 24 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak24 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1036 µg/m³
Optical depth0.17
8910111213141516171819202122232425
Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

Particles from the Copernicus CAMS model at the centre of the perimeter; these are not measurements in each town. The pale bar is the worst hour, the solid one the daily average.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)

Detections table · 478Every 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 10 August 2022 and 22 August 2022: 13 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 14,697 hectares (147.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Roper Gulf (14,807 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 33.0 °C, humidity dropped to 6 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 63, 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

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
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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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 478 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.