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AU · Australia · –

Unincorporated NT fire, 12 June 2025 Unincorporated NT

Out · last detection 22 Jun 2025, 05:25 UTC

The fire started on 12 June 2025 in Unincorporated NT, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 11 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 20,966 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
20,966ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
11days
12 Jun 2025 – 22 Jun 2025
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
12 Jun
2025
Heat detections
701
in a single hotspot: 211 MW
Danger at start
34
High · FWI index
Average daily power
522MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 12 Jun22 Jun
22 Jun 2025

How it evolved, day by day

12 Jun 2025 · 3,299 MW · 364 13 Jun 2025 · 523 MW · 139 14 Jun 2025 · 119 MW · 28 15 Jun 2025 · 43 MW · 13 16 Jun 2025 · 113 MW · 15 17 Jun 2025 · 221 MW · 33 18 Jun 2025 · 227 MW · 25 19 Jun 2025 · 195 MW · 24 20 Jun 2025 · 668 MW · 27 21 Jun 2025 · 178 MW · 13 22 Jun 2025 · 152 MW · 20
12 Jun 15 Jun 18 Jun 21 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

32°high
48km/h · peak gust
23%lowest humidity

It had gone 14 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

100% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 13,247 ha in 2016, 4,579 ha in 2017, 8,209 ha in 2018, 17,800 ha in 2019, 1,065 ha in 2020, 6,444 ha in 2021, 11,957 ha in 2022, 12,488 ha in 2023, 2,477 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 21,044 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 13% of the area of London (210 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
    20,568 ha reached on 12 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 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)
12 Jun 29.5 °C 23 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
13 Jun 29.2 °C 24 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
14 Jun 29.2 °C 23 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
15 Jun 27.8 °C 24 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
16 Jun 29.4 °C 39 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
17 Jun 30.2 °C 28 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
18 Jun 30.0 °C 38 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
19 Jun 30.2 °C 35 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
20 Jun 30.6 °C 36 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
21 Jun 31.6 °C 35 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
22 Jun 30.0 °C 38 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
23 Jun after 29.5 °C 46 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
24 Jun after 31.3 °C 40 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
25 Jun after 32.1 °C 39 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
26 Jun after 30.5 °C 25 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
27 Jun after 29.4 °C 27 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
28 Jun after 28.8 °C 24 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
29 Jun after 27.8 °C 27 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
30 Jun after 28.6 °C 32 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
1 Jul after 28.8 °C 24 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
2 Jul after 28.7 °C 27 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
3 Jul after 29.5 °C 22 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
4 Jul after 30.9 °C 23 % 18 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
5 Jul after 31.2 °C 27 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
6 Jul after 31.7 °C 33 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
7 Jul after 31.3 °C 34 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
8 Jul after 32.4 °C 29 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
9 Jul after 31.9 °C 31 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 35

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 5 Jun 2025
After · 29 Jun 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 13 June 2025 the air beside the fire reached 37 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 24: 1.6 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak37 µg/m³
Days over the guideline1 day
PM1039 µg/m³
Optical depth0.35
10 Jun14 Jun18 Jun22 Jun
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 · 701Every 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?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 12 June 2025 and 22 June 2025: 11 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 20,966 hectares (209.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Unincorporated NT (20,568 ha, 1.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 32.1 °C, humidity dropped to 23 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 42, 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 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. 701 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.