The fire started on 17 May 2023 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 7 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 39,338 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.
This entry is probably a savanna fire in Australia’s tropical north, not a bushfire like those in the south of the country. Millions of hectares of northern savanna and grassland burn every year: much of it in burns lit on purpose early in the dry season (traditional fire management, parks and cattle stations), the rest in grass fires that return to the same ground every few years. This is our assumption, based on the location; it is not confirmed. That is why it is left out of the wildfire rankings.
Union of 2 GWIS (Copernicus) perimeters: overlapping areas count once.
No official record is matched to this page to compare it with.
17 May 2023 to 23 May 2023: first and last day with fire on the page.
Satellites pass a few times a day and cloud or smoke can hide the fire: a lack of detections is not an official extinction. Each country’s emergency service declares a fire contained or out.
First day with fire seen by the satellites or the perimeter.
No official record is matched to this page, so the alert time and the cause are not known here.
VIIRS detections at 375 m. Most intense hotspot: 157 MW.
There is no official record to compare with. Each hotspot is a pixel detected in one satellite pass, not a separate fire.
Total radiative power on 17 May 2023; hotspots that day: 821.
Fire radiative power (FRP) measures the energy the fire gives off when the satellite passes. Added up by day, it compares intensity, not area.
Fire Weather Index (Canadian system) computed by WorldFires for the day the fire started. Consecutive days without rain before: 25.
This is an index computed from weather model data, not a measurement of the fire nor an official warning. Danger warnings are issued by each country’s authority. Emergency number and official warnings
High of 31.3 °C and minimum humidity of 25% on 17 May 2023; gusts of 44 km/h on 21 May 2023.
These are model values for a cell of about 25 km, not from a weather station: they may differ from what was measured on the ground.
This page’s change log has been kept since 24 October 2026: every night what it publishes is compared and the difference is logged. Anything earlier is reconstructed from each source’s date and marked as reconstructed.
Every night a snapshot of what the page shows is saved. If anything changes, it appears in the list as a log entry.
A version keeps the area, dates, name and official record; the area as it was logged (changes under 2% are not logged). The map, hotspots and weather always show today’s data.
| fecha | focos_viirs | frp_mw | tmax_c | tmin_c | hr_min_pct | viento_max_kmh | racha_max_kmh | precip_mm | fwi | clase_fwi | dentro_del_incendio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-05-17 | 821 | 13,914 | 31.3 | 18 | 25 | 18.1 | 37.8 | 0 | 39.3 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2023-05-18 | 318 | 3,735 | 30 | 14.3 | 21 | 16.1 | 33.8 | 0 | 37.9 | alto | 1 |
| 2023-05-19 | 118 | 1,870 | 29.5 | 13 | 21 | 16.6 | 35.6 | 0 | 38.7 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2023-05-20 | 45 | 404 | 28 | 13.5 | 21 | 18.8 | 38.5 | 0 | 41.2 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2023-05-21 | 65 | 478 | 26.9 | 11.7 | 18 | 21.9 | 44.3 | 0 | 44.8 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2023-05-22 | 59 | 819 | 28.4 | 11.6 | 19 | 20.6 | 41.4 | 0 | 43.9 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2023-05-23 | 23 | 189 | 30.1 | 13 | 21 | 19.6 | 41.4 | 0 | 43.3 | muy_alto | 1 |
| 2023-05-24 | 0 | 0 | 29.7 | 13.5 | 17 | 19.6 | 40 | 0 | 44.4 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2023-05-25 | 0 | 0 | 30.4 | 11.3 | 21 | 15 | 33.8 | 0 | 40.2 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2023-05-26 | 0 | 0 | 30.2 | 18 | 29 | 20.6 | 39.6 | 0 | 43.3 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2023-05-27 | 0 | 0 | 28.4 | 16.3 | 23 | 19.9 | 38.2 | 0 | 42.9 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2023-05-28 | 0 | 0 | 26.6 | 11.1 | 18 | 15.4 | 33.1 | 0 | 38.9 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2023-05-29 | 0 | 0 | 27.2 | 10.8 | 17 | 20.4 | 40.7 | 0 | 44.5 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2023-05-30 | 0 | 0 | 28.2 | 9.5 | 19 | 21.7 | 43.6 | 0 | 46.2 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2023-05-31 | 0 | 0 | 29.6 | 8.1 | 16 | 17 | 37.4 | 0 | 43.5 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2023-06-01 | 0 | 0 | 30.8 | 11.3 | 25 | 14.1 | 33.5 | 0 | 40.5 | muy_alto | 0 |
| 2023-06-02 | 0 | 0 | 31.5 | 15.5 | 31 | 13.7 | 31 | 0 | 37.3 | alto | 0 |
It is generated in your browser from this page’s data: one file per fire, aggregated by day and without individual hotspots.
It updates itself while the fire is still active and links to this page. Free, with the attribution shown at the bottom.
Sources for this page: GWIS (Copernicus), NASA FIRMS (VIIRS), ERA5 (ECMWF/Copernicus C3S) · Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0), GHSL (JRC). Open-Meteo.com · How we build fire pages: methodology
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
It had gone 25 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.
44% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 60 ha in 2016, 3,522 ha in 2017, 5,067 ha in 2018, 1,630 ha in 2020, 10,472 ha in 2021, 1,131 ha in 2022. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 17,313 ha that had burned before.
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
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.
Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2025, 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. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.
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
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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 17 May | 31.3 °C | 25 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 39 |
| 18 May | 30.0 °C | 21 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 38 |
| 19 May | 29.5 °C | 21 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 39 |
| 20 May | 28.0 °C | 21 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 41 |
| 21 May | 26.9 °C | 18 % | 44 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 45 |
| 22 May | 28.4 °C | 19 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 23 May | 30.1 °C | 21 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 43 |
| 24 May after | 29.7 °C | 17 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 25 May after | 30.4 °C | 21 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 40 |
| 26 May after | 30.2 °C | 29 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 43 |
| 27 May after | 28.4 °C | 23 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 43 |
| 28 May after | 26.6 °C | 18 % | 33 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 39 |
| 29 May after | 27.2 °C | 17 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 30 May after | 28.2 °C | 19 % | 44 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 46 |
| 31 May after | 29.6 °C | 16 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 1 Jun after | 30.8 °C | 25 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 40 |
| 2 Jun after | 31.5 °C | 31 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 37 |
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.
On 18 May 2023 the air beside the fire reached 103 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 31: 2.1 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
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)
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
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
RSS Changes to this page With cross-checks and a citable version
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.
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.