How long did the Roper Gulf fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 19 August 2022 to 30 August 2022 (12 days). The perimeter dates it from 19 August 2022 to 29 August 2022.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 14,465 hectares (144.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Roper Gulf (14,504 ha, 0.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 36.0 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 60, 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.

AU · Australia · 2022-08-19 → 2022-08-30

Roper Gulf fire, 19 August 2022 Roper Gulf

Out · last detection 30 Aug 2022, 04:40 UTC

The fire started on 19 August 2022 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 14,465 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 960th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3518 with a page). Number 115 in Australia in 2022, of 566.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Roper Gulf · 2017 Roper Gulf · 2017 Roper Gulf · 2021 Roper Gulf · 2023

Burnt area: 14,465ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 12days; 19 Aug 2022 – 30 Aug 2022
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 19 Aug; 2022
Heat detections: 568; in a single hotspot: 124 MW
Danger at start: 56; Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power: 387MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 19 Aug30 Aug

Play back 30 Aug 2022

How it evolved, day by day

19 Aug 21 Aug 23 Aug 24 Aug 25 Aug 27 Aug 29 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

36°high

48km/h · peak gust

9%lowest humidity

It had gone 48 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

88% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 3,607 ha in 2016, 5,392 ha in 2017, 7,837 ha in 2018, 4,493 ha in 2019, 4,584 ha in 2020, 3,103 ha in 2021. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 12,741 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 9.1% of the area of London (145 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

14,504 ha reached on 19 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)
19 Aug	32.1 °C	14 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 56
20 Aug	31.6 °C	14 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
21 Aug	31.9 °C	14 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 58
22 Aug	32.9 °C	14 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 53
23 Aug	33.8 °C	11 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 60
24 Aug	28.1 °C	13 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 59
25 Aug	28.2 °C	9 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 57
26 Aug	31.4 °C	11 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 54
27 Aug	33.7 °C	21 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 49
28 Aug	36.0 °C	21 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 50
29 Aug	34.8 °C	35 %	35 km/h	0.5 mm	Very high 38
30 Aug	35.4 °C	33 %	44 km/h	0.2 mm	Very high 43
31 Aug after	35.5 °C	26 %	52 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
1 Sept after	35.7 °C	28 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
2 Sept after	34.5 °C	31 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 46
3 Sept after	31.9 °C	28 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 46
4 Sept after	32.4 °C	21 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
5 Sept after	34.0 °C	17 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
6 Sept after	36.0 °C	9 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 55
7 Sept after	36.1 °C	20 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 50
8 Sept after	36.8 °C	23 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
9 Sept after	37.6 °C	21 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 49

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 12 Aug 2022

After · 6 Sept 2022

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.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 27 August 2022 the air beside the fire reached 21 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak21 µg/m³

Days over the guideline0 days

PM1034 µg/m³

Optical depth0.37

WHO 15

1718192021222324252627282930311

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 · 568Every 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 19 August 2022 to 30 August 2022 (12 days). The perimeter dates it from 19 August 2022 to 29 August 2022.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 14,465 hectares (144.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Roper Gulf (14,504 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 36.0 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 60, 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

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: 29 August 2022 → 30 August 2022.

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 19 August 2022 to 29 August 2022. 568 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