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AU · Australia · –

Roper Gulf fire, 31 October 2025 Barkly, Roper Gulf

Out · last detection 14 Nov 2025, 16:17 UTC

The fire started on 31 October 2025 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 15 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 32,080 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.

GWIS near-real-time perimeter, from the layer that changed in October 2025: this fire is not compared with fires from earlier years, because since then the GWIS layer gives more and larger perimeters.

Compare with…
Burnt area
32,080ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
15days
31 Oct 2025 – 14 Nov 2025
Municipalities hit
2
local government areas
Started on
31 Oct
2025
Heat detections
872
in a single hotspot: 248 MW
Danger at start
37
High · FWI index
Average daily power
659MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 31 Oct14 Nov
14 Nov 2025

How it evolved, day by day

31 Oct 2025 · 19 MW · 7 1 Nov 2025 · 23 MW · 3 2 Nov 2025 · 1,342 MW · 60 3 Nov 2025 · 299 MW · 56 4 Nov 2025 · 1,011 MW · 155 5 Nov 2025 · 1,806 MW · 256 6 Nov 2025 · 2,196 MW · 213 10 Nov 2025 · 6 MW · 6 11 Nov 2025 · 274 MW · 18 12 Nov 2025 · 47 MW · 3 13 Nov 2025 · 333 MW · 19 14 Nov 2025 · 549 MW · 76
31 Oct 3 Nov 6 Nov 12 Nov

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

The weather it burned in

39°high
45km/h · peak gust
11%lowest humidity

It had gone 14 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 7.7 mm on 15 Nov.

This area had burned before

2% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 653 ha in 2018, 314 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 751 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 20% of the area of London (321 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. 25,924 ha
    0.1 %
  2. Roper Gulf where it started
    6,103 ha
    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)

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
31 Oct 39.3 °C 23 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
1 Nov 38.2 °C 33 % 37 km/h 3.4 mm Very high 40
2 Nov 38.9 °C 24 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
3 Nov 32.7 °C 41 % 45 km/h 3.9 mm Very high 46
4 Nov 33.0 °C 35 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 15
5 Nov 35.4 °C 23 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
6 Nov 37.3 °C 22 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
7 Nov 36.8 °C 32 % 37 km/h 0.5 mm Very high 39
8 Nov 28.6 °C 57 % 31 km/h 7.5 mm Very low 1
9 Nov 35.2 °C 35 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 17
10 Nov 35.6 °C 22 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
11 Nov 36.1 °C 18 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
12 Nov 36.2 °C 11 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
13 Nov 36.5 °C 18 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
14 Nov 35.3 °C 29 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
15 Nov after 32.9 °C 52 % 27 km/h 7.7 mm Moderate 14

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 24 Oct 2025
After · 21 Nov 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 6 November 2025 the air beside the fire reached 70 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 35: 2.4 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak70 µg/m³
Days over the guideline8 days
PM1072 µg/m³
Optical depth1.17
29 Oct2 Nov6 Nov10 Nov14 Nov
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 · 872Every 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 31 October 2025 and 14 November 2025: 15 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 32,080 hectares (320.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Barkly (25,924 ha, 0.1 %); Roper Gulf (6,103 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 39.3 °C, humidity dropped to 11 % and gusts hit 45 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 56, 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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 872 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.