How long did the Cook fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 20 November 2016 and 11 December 2016: 22 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 23,185 hectares (231.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Cook (23,463 ha, 0.2 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 38.3 °C, humidity dropped to 17 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 51, 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.

AU · Australia · 2016-11-20 → 2016-12-11

Cook fire, 20 November 2016 Cook

Out · last detection 12 Dec 2016, 03:30 UTC

The fire started on 20 November 2016 in Cook, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 22 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 23,185 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 271th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 48 in Australia in 2016, of 427.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Cook · 2020 Cook · 2025 Cook · 2022 Cook · 2016

Burnt area: 23,185ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 22days; 20 Nov 2016 – 11 Dec 2016
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 20 Nov; 2016
Heat detections: 837; in a single hotspot: 122 MW
Danger at start: 51; Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power: 361MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 20 Nov11 Dec

Play back 12 Dec 2016

How it evolved, day by day

20 Nov 24 Nov 25 Nov 28 Nov 2 Dec 6 Dec 10 Dec

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

The weather it burned in

38°high

48km/h · peak gust

17%lowest humidity

It had gone 44 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 8.4 mm on 17 Dec.

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 15% of the area of London (232 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

23,463 ha reached on 19 Nov

0.2 %

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)
19 Nov	35.9 °C	23 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 51
20 Nov	35.4 °C	30 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
21 Nov	34.6 °C	33 %	38 km/h	0.2 mm	Very high 41
22 Nov	36.8 °C	22 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 44
23 Nov	37.5 °C	26 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
24 Nov	37.8 °C	25 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 51
25 Nov	38.1 °C	24 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Extreme 51
26 Nov	37.0 °C	27 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 50
27 Nov	37.5 °C	28 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
28 Nov	35.3 °C	33 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
29 Nov	36.7 °C	32 %	36 km/h	7.4 mm	Moderate 14
30 Nov	36.4 °C	27 %	32 km/h	2.4 mm	High 22
1 Dec	36.3 °C	28 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
2 Dec	38.2 °C	24 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
3 Dec	38.3 °C	17 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
4 Dec	36.6 °C	26 %	48 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
5 Dec	37.6 °C	24 %	47 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
6 Dec	37.3 °C	22 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
7 Dec	37.4 °C	25 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
8 Dec	36.8 °C	34 %	41 km/h	0.3 mm	High 38
9 Dec	37.5 °C	27 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
10 Dec	37.0 °C	29 %	38 km/h	0.1 mm	Very high 40
11 Dec	37.1 °C	27 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
12 Dec after	35.1 °C	37 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
13 Dec after	35.7 °C	39 %	44 km/h	0.7 mm	High 30
14 Dec after	36.1 °C	37 %	43 km/h	2.3 mm	Moderate 18
15 Dec after	35.8 °C	39 %	38 km/h	0.2 mm	High 28
16 Dec after	35.7 °C	41 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
17 Dec after	34.8 °C	45 %	39 km/h	8.4 mm	Low 7

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 13 Nov 2016

After · 18 Dec 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 · 837Every 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 20 November 2016 and 11 December 2016: 22 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 23,185 hectares (231.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Cook (23,463 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 38.3 °C, humidity dropped to 17 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 51, 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

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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 837 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