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AU · Australia · –

Unincorporated NT fire, 14 June 2018 Unincorporated NT

Out · last detection 28 Jun 2018, 04:14 UTC

The fire started on 14 June 2018 in Unincorporated NT, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 15 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 21,697 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
21,697ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
15days
14 Jun 2018 – 28 Jun 2018
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
14 Jun
2018
Heat detections
628
in a single hotspot: 66 MW
Danger at start
28
High · FWI index
Average daily power
278MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 14 Jun28 Jun
28 Jun 2018

How it evolved, day by day

14 Jun 2018 · 10 MW · 1 16 Jun 2018 · 24 MW · 6 17 Jun 2018 · 477 MW · 90 18 Jun 2018 · 596 MW · 89 19 Jun 2018 · 350 MW · 66 20 Jun 2018 · 333 MW · 49 21 Jun 2018 · 185 MW · 44 22 Jun 2018 · 225 MW · 35 23 Jun 2018 · 95 MW · 20 24 Jun 2018 · 29 MW · 16 25 Jun 2018 · 961 MW · 120 26 Jun 2018 · 488 MW · 67 27 Jun 2018 · 120 MW · 24 28 Jun 2018 · 2 MW · 1
14 Jun 18 Jun 21 Jun 25 Jun

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

The weather it burned in

33°high
48km/h · peak gust
13%lowest humidity

It had gone 55 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

73% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 13,261 ha in 2016, 10,045 ha in 2017. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 15,880 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 14% of the area of London (217 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. Unincorporated NT where it started
    21,217 ha reached on 14 Jun
    1.1 %

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 area0.20 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.20 hectares of 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)
14 Jun 32.5 °C 42 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
15 Jun 32.5 °C 31 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
16 Jun 32.9 °C 31 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
17 Jun 31.7 °C 17 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
18 Jun 31.5 °C 27 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
19 Jun 32.2 °C 28 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
20 Jun 33.4 °C 25 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
21 Jun 32.3 °C 13 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
22 Jun 31.5 °C 18 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
23 Jun 31.1 °C 21 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
24 Jun 31.5 °C 28 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
25 Jun 32.4 °C 33 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
26 Jun 33.0 °C 34 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
27 Jun 32.0 °C 33 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
28 Jun 31.6 °C 30 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
29 Jun after 32.4 °C 34 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
30 Jun after 33.2 °C 35 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
1 Jul after 32.9 °C 37 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
2 Jul after 34.1 °C 29 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
3 Jul after 33.4 °C 30 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
4 Jul after 33.5 °C 18 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
5 Jul after 32.7 °C 26 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
6 Jul after 32.7 °C 29 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
7 Jul after 32.1 °C 30 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
8 Jul after 30.0 °C 19 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 7 Jun 2018
After · 5 Jul 2018

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

Detections table · 628Every 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 Unincorporated NT fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 14 June 2018 to 28 June 2018 (15 days). The perimeter dates it from 16 June 2018 to 28 June 2018.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 21,697 hectares (217.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Unincorporated NT (21,217 ha, 1.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 33.4 °C, humidity dropped to 13 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 46, class Very high.
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. Start date: 16 June 2018 → 14 June 2018.

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 16 June 2018 to 28 June 2018. 628 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.
  • 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.