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Cook fire, 1 September 2019 Cook

Out · last detection 16 Sept 2019, 03:30 UTC

The fire started on 1 September 2019 in Cook, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 16 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 8,607 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 911th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 442 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Cook · 2017Cook · 2017Cook · 2021Cook · 2021

Burnt area
8,607ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
16days
1 Sept 2019 – 16 Sept 2019
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
1 Sept
2019
Heat detections
336
in a single hotspot: 135 MW
Danger at start
29
High · FWI index
Average daily power
120MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Sept16 Sept
16 Sept 2019

How it evolved, day by day

1 Sept 2019 · 53 MW · 7 2 Sept 2019 · 23 MW · 10 3 Sept 2019 · 92 MW · 20 4 Sept 2019 · 83 MW · 22 5 Sept 2019 · 68 MW · 23 6 Sept 2019 · 10 MW · 8 7 Sept 2019 · 69 MW · 27 8 Sept 2019 · 715 MW · 56 9 Sept 2019 · 302 MW · 57 10 Sept 2019 · 240 MW · 28 11 Sept 2019 · 98 MW · 33 12 Sept 2019 · 17 MW · 7 13 Sept 2019 · 42 MW · 11 14 Sept 2019 · 61 MW · 18 15 Sept 2019 · 27 MW · 6 16 Sept 2019 · 14 MW · 2
1 Sept 4 Sept 7 Sept 8 Sept 10 Sept 13 Sept 16 Sept

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

The weather it burned in

31°high
59km/h · peak gust
22%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

29% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 859 ha in 2016, 1,073 ha in 2017, 606 ha in 2018.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 5.4% of the area of London (86 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. Cook where it started
    8,671 ha reached on 31 Aug
    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 2020
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable 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)
31 Aug 27.4 °C 41 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
1 Sept 26.9 °C 41 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
2 Sept 26.4 °C 40 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
3 Sept 25.8 °C 41 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
4 Sept 25.7 °C 42 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
5 Sept 26.5 °C 37 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
6 Sept 27.0 °C 38 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
7 Sept 28.6 °C 31 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
8 Sept 30.9 °C 24 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
9 Sept 28.2 °C 23 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
10 Sept 27.3 °C 22 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
11 Sept 25.9 °C 38 % 56 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
12 Sept 27.0 °C 38 % 59 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
13 Sept 27.1 °C 38 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
14 Sept 26.5 °C 35 % 57 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
15 Sept 25.7 °C 42 % 58 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
16 Sept 26.5 °C 43 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
17 Sept after 27.5 °C 40 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
18 Sept after 28.0 °C 35 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
19 Sept after 27.1 °C 44 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
20 Sept after 26.7 °C 48 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
21 Sept after 28.3 °C 45 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
22 Sept after 27.6 °C 49 % 58 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
23 Sept after 27.0 °C 49 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
24 Sept after 27.1 °C 52 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
25 Sept after 26.8 °C 49 % 55 km/h 0.1 mm High 32
26 Sept after 27.4 °C 51 % 60 km/h 0.0 mm High 33

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 25 Aug 2019
After · 23 Sept 2019

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 · 336Every 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 Cook fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 1 September 2019 and 16 September 2019: 16 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 8,607 hectares (86.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Cook (8,671 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 30.9 °C, humidity dropped to 22 % and gusts hit 59 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.

No changes since 24 October 2026.

RSS Changes to this page

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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 336 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.

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.