How long did the Cook fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 10 October 2016 and 22 October 2016: 13 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 6,953 hectares (69.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Cook (6,951 ha, 0.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 34.3 °C, humidity dropped to 33 % and gusts hit 72 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 40, 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.

AU · Australia · 2016-10-10 → 2016-10-22

Cook fire, 10 October 2016 Cook

Out · last detection 22 Oct 2016, 15:34 UTC

The fire started on 10 October 2016 in Cook, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 13 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,953 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1166th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 249 in Australia in 2016, of 427.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Cook · 2022 Cook · 2026 Cook · 2016 Cook · 2023

Burnt area: 6,953ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 13days; 10 Oct 2016 – 22 Oct 2016
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 10 Oct; 2016
Heat detections: 326; in a single hotspot: 80 MW
Danger at start: 40; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 106MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 10 Oct22 Oct

Play back 22 Oct 2016

How it evolved, day by day

10 Oct 12 Oct 14 Oct 16 Oct 17 Oct 18 Oct 20 Oct 22 Oct

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

The weather it burned in

34°high

72km/h · peak gust

33%lowest humidity

It had gone 13 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 4.4% of the area of London (70 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

Cook where it started

6,951 ha reached on 6 Oct

0.1 %

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 2015

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2015, 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)
6 Oct	33.9 °C	41 %	72 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
7 Oct	32.0 °C	43 %	63 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
8 Oct	32.8 °C	42 %	60 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
9 Oct	31.2 °C	56 %	60 km/h	0.4 mm	High 32
10 Oct	32.3 °C	45 %	53 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
11 Oct	33.6 °C	34 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
12 Oct	34.3 °C	33 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
13 Oct	33.4 °C	39 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
14 Oct	33.2 °C	39 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
15 Oct	32.7 °C	41 %	53 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
16 Oct	32.7 °C	42 %	53 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
17 Oct	32.9 °C	41 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
18 Oct	33.6 °C	37 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
19 Oct	33.7 °C	41 %	47 km/h	0.0 mm	High 38
20 Oct	31.8 °C	54 %	58 km/h	0.8 mm	High 27
21 Oct	32.8 °C	41 %	59 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
22 Oct	33.1 °C	45 %	51 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
23 Oct after	33.1 °C	42 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
24 Oct after	32.7 °C	42 %	46 km/h	0.1 mm	High 32
25 Oct after	32.8 °C	42 %	57 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
26 Oct after	33.8 °C	40 %	52 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
27 Oct after	34.5 °C	39 %	53 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
28 Oct after	34.3 °C	43 %	47 km/h	0.2 mm	High 33
29 Oct after	34.4 °C	39 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
30 Oct after	33.4 °C	39 %	51 km/h	0.1 mm	High 35
31 Oct after	34.1 °C	35 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
1 Nov after	35.0 °C	31 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
2 Nov after	34.3 °C	41 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
3 Nov after	33.4 °C	48 %	53 km/h	0.2 mm	High 37

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 3 Oct 2016

After · 29 Oct 2016

Before After

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 · 326Every 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 time	Satellite	FRP (MW)	Lat	Lon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Australia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Cook fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 10 October 2016 and 22 October 2016: 13 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 6,953 hectares (69.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Cook (6,951 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 34.3 °C, humidity dropped to 33 % and gusts hit 72 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 40, 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

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

History of this page Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

No changes since 24 October 2026.

RSS Changes to this page

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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.

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What really happened?

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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. 326 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 2015, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.

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.

Where it burned