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AU · Australia · –

Roper Gulf fire, 25 June 2025 Roper Gulf

Out · last detection 2 Jul 2025, 03:56 UTC

The fire started on 25 June 2025 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,657 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

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.

The power measured by the satellite is low (11.0 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.

Burnt area
6,657ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
9days
25 Jun 2025 – 3 Jul 2025
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
25 Jun
2025
Heat detections
220
in a single hotspot: 11 MW
Danger at start
64
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
89MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 25 Jun3 Jul
2 Jul 2025

How it evolved, day by day

25 Jun 2025 · 151 MW · 43 26 Jun 2025 · 178 MW · 53 27 Jun 2025 · 156 MW · 36 28 Jun 2025 · 41 MW · 28 29 Jun 2025 · 14 MW · 7 30 Jun 2025 · 43 MW · 18 1 Jul 2025 · 81 MW · 23 2 Jul 2025 · 46 MW · 12
26 Jun 29 Jun 1 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

31°high
49km/h · peak gust
17%lowest humidity

It had gone 56 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

84% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,036 ha in 2016, 124 ha in 2017, 4,097 ha in 2018, 17 ha in 2019, 11 ha in 2020, 342 ha in 2021, 2,024 ha in 2022, 775 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 5,599 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 4.2% of the area of London (67 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
    6,704 ha reached on 25 Jun
    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 2025
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

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

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)

Started with Extreme FWI: 43 % of the area in Australia

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
25 Jun 30.9 °C 27 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 64
26 Jun 29.2 °C 20 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
27 Jun 29.1 °C 20 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
28 Jun 28.2 °C 24 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
29 Jun 27.0 °C 27 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
30 Jun 27.9 °C 30 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
1 Jul 27.7 °C 22 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
2 Jul 27.7 °C 21 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
3 Jul 27.7 °C 17 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
4 Jul after 29.2 °C 24 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
5 Jul after 31.6 °C 33 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
6 Jul after 32.2 °C 30 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
7 Jul after 31.2 °C 22 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 64
8 Jul after 32.3 °C 21 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
9 Jul after 32.3 °C 18 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
10 Jul after 31.7 °C 11 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 74
11 Jul after 29.5 °C 20 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 69
12 Jul after 31.2 °C 25 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 70
13 Jul after 32.4 °C 27 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 18 Jun 2025
After · 10 Jul 2025

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 5 July 2025 the air beside the fire reached 15 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak15 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1017 µg/m³
Optical depth0.20
23 Jun26 Jun29 Jun2 Jul5 Jul
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 · 220Every 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 25 June 2025 and 3 July 2025: 9 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 6,657 hectares (66.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Roper Gulf (6,704 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 30.9 °C, humidity dropped to 17 % and gusts hit 49 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 64, 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.

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
What do you think is wrong?

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. 220 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 2025, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.
  • Probably a vegetation burn: not counted in the totals.

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.