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AU · Australia · –

Roper Gulf fire, 27 June 2025 Roper Gulf

Out · last detection 9 Jul 2025, 05:05 UTC

The fire started on 27 June 2025 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 14 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,549 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.

Burnt area
6,549ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
14days
27 Jun 2025 – 10 Jul 2025
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
27 Jun
2025
Heat detections
217
in a single hotspot: 68 MW
Danger at start
61
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
102MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 27 Jun10 Jul
9 Jul 2025

How it evolved, day by day

27 Jun 2025 · 3 MW · 2 28 Jun 2025 · 13 MW · 8 29 Jun 2025 · 31 MW · 23 30 Jun 2025 · 307 MW · 80 1 Jul 2025 · 301 MW · 72 2 Jul 2025 · 49 MW · 11 4 Jul 2025 · 31 MW · 4 7 Jul 2025 · 1 MW · 1 8 Jul 2025 · 46 MW · 8 9 Jul 2025 · 237 MW · 8
27 Jun 30 Jun 4 Jul 8 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

32°high
48km/h · peak gust
11%lowest humidity

It had gone 58 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

97% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 5,031 ha in 2018, 526 ha in 2020, 1,895 ha in 2021, 2,030 ha in 2022, 3,610 ha in 2023, 249 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 6,334 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 4.1% of the area of London (65 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
    6,603 ha reached on 27 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)
27 Jun 28.8 °C 20 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
28 Jun 27.9 °C 24 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
29 Jun 26.7 °C 28 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
30 Jun 27.5 °C 30 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 62
1 Jul 27.5 °C 22 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
2 Jul 27.3 °C 21 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
3 Jul 27.3 °C 16 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
4 Jul 28.8 °C 21 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
5 Jul 31.1 °C 34 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
6 Jul 31.7 °C 30 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
7 Jul 30.7 °C 22 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 61
8 Jul 31.8 °C 22 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
9 Jul 31.7 °C 17 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
10 Jul 31.1 °C 11 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 74
11 Jul after 29.3 °C 20 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very extreme 71
12 Jul after 31.0 °C 26 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 68
13 Jul after 32.1 °C 26 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 57
14 Jul after 30.5 °C 25 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
15 Jul after 30.2 °C 30 % 24 km/h 0.1 mm High 37
16 Jul after 31.1 °C 29 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
17 Jul after 31.2 °C 23 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
18 Jul after 29.0 °C 23 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
19 Jul after 29.1 °C 16 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
20 Jul after 28.0 °C 15 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 20 Jun 2025
After · 17 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 22 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak22 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1025 µg/m³
Optical depth0.29
25 Jun28 Jun1 Jul4 Jul7 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 · 217Every 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?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 27 June 2025 to 10 July 2025 (14 days). The perimeter dates it from 27 June 2025 to 4 July 2025.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,549 hectares (65.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Roper Gulf (6,603 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 31.8 °C, humidity dropped to 11 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 74, class Very 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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 4 July 2025 → 10 July 2025.

RSS Changes to this page With cross-checks and a citable version

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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 27 June 2025 to 4 July 2025. 217 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.