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Cook fire, 2 September 2019 Cook

Out · last detection 14 Sept 2019, 04:08 UTC

The fire started on 2 September 2019 in Cook, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 13 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,390 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1297th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 604 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Cook · 2016Cook · 2018Cook · 2023Cook · 2016

Burnt area
6,390ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
13days
2 Sept 2019 – 14 Sept 2019
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
2 Sept
2019
Heat detections
184
in a single hotspot: 126 MW
Danger at start
29
High · FWI index
Average daily power
182MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 2 Sept14 Sept
14 Sept 2019

How it evolved, day by day

3 Sept 2019 · 57 MW · 21 4 Sept 2019 · 485 MW · 12 5 Sept 2019 · 949 MW · 50 6 Sept 2019 · 123 MW · 18 7 Sept 2019 · 176 MW · 23 8 Sept 2019 · 82 MW · 12 9 Sept 2019 · 107 MW · 18 10 Sept 2019 · 165 MW · 14 11 Sept 2019 · 4 MW · 3 12 Sept 2019 · 6 MW · 8 13 Sept 2019 · 12 MW · 3 14 Sept 2019 · 14 MW · 2
3 Sept 5 Sept 7 Sept 9 Sept 11 Sept 13 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

28°high
64km/h · peak gust
40%lowest humidity

It had gone 49 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

12% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 737 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 4% of the area of London (64 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
    6,366 ha reached on 3 Sept
    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)
3 Sept 26.2 °C 51 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
4 Sept 26.2 °C 51 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
5 Sept 26.4 °C 51 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
6 Sept 26.9 °C 48 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
7 Sept 27.4 °C 47 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
8 Sept 27.9 °C 40 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
9 Sept 26.9 °C 47 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
10 Sept 27.0 °C 40 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
11 Sept 26.1 °C 49 % 64 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
12 Sept 27.2 °C 54 % 62 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
13 Sept 26.4 °C 55 % 58 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
14 Sept 27.4 °C 50 % 56 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
15 Sept after 27.4 °C 51 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
16 Sept after 26.9 °C 60 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
17 Sept after 27.6 °C 56 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
18 Sept after 28.3 °C 49 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
19 Sept after 28.3 °C 60 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
20 Sept after 27.0 °C 65 % 57 km/h 0.2 mm High 28
21 Sept after 27.6 °C 64 % 61 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
22 Sept after 27.9 °C 61 % 63 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
23 Sept after 28.1 °C 59 % 63 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
24 Sept after 28.6 °C 54 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm High 28

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 26 Aug 2019
After · 21 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 · 184Every 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?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 2 September 2019 to 14 September 2019 (13 days). The perimeter dates it from 3 September 2019 to 13 September 2019.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,390 hectares (63.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Cook (6,366 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 27.9 °C, humidity dropped to 40 % and gusts hit 64 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

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 adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 3 September 2019 to 13 September 2019. 184 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.