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Cook fire, 4 October 2019 Cook

Out · last detection 24 Oct 2019, 16:06 UTC

The fire started on 4 October 2019 in Cook, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 21 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 9,701 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 788th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 389 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Cook · 2026Cook · 2021Cook · 2026Cook · 2023

Burnt area
9,701ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
21days
4 Oct 2019 – 24 Oct 2019
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
4 Oct
2019
Heat detections
499
in a single hotspot: 57 MW
Danger at start
30
High · FWI index
Average daily power
154MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 4 Oct24 Oct
24 Oct 2019

How it evolved, day by day

4 Oct 2019 · 3 MW · 3 5 Oct 2019 · 65 MW · 13 6 Oct 2019 · 142 MW · 15 7 Oct 2019 · 20 MW · 9 8 Oct 2019 · 74 MW · 15 9 Oct 2019 · 134 MW · 30 10 Oct 2019 · 28 MW · 11 11 Oct 2019 · 84 MW · 24 12 Oct 2019 · 6 MW · 4 13 Oct 2019 · 165 MW · 33 14 Oct 2019 · 166 MW · 40 15 Oct 2019 · 181 MW · 36 16 Oct 2019 · 286 MW · 42 17 Oct 2019 · 277 MW · 25 18 Oct 2019 · 118 MW · 14 19 Oct 2019 · 30 MW · 19 20 Oct 2019 · 546 MW · 63 21 Oct 2019 · 350 MW · 41 22 Oct 2019 · 276 MW · 31 23 Oct 2019 · 202 MW · 20 24 Oct 2019 · 81 MW · 11
4 Oct 7 Oct 10 Oct 13 Oct 16 Oct 19 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

31°high
67km/h · peak gust
33%lowest humidity

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

This area had burned before

14% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,376 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 6.1% of the area of London (97 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
    9,763 ha reached on 4 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 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)
4 Oct 25.5 °C 54 % 61 km/h 0.1 mm High 30
5 Oct 25.8 °C 51 % 57 km/h 0.2 mm High 28
6 Oct 26.1 °C 52 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
7 Oct 26.0 °C 50 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
8 Oct 26.8 °C 46 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
9 Oct 28.4 °C 36 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
10 Oct 28.2 °C 41 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
11 Oct 28.4 °C 46 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
12 Oct 30.0 °C 40 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
13 Oct 29.9 °C 40 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
14 Oct 28.2 °C 44 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
15 Oct 28.0 °C 39 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
16 Oct 28.6 °C 43 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
17 Oct 28.4 °C 46 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
18 Oct 28.3 °C 50 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
19 Oct 28.5 °C 43 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
20 Oct 30.6 °C 33 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
21 Oct 27.7 °C 47 % 51 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
22 Oct 26.8 °C 47 % 67 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
23 Oct 27.0 °C 53 % 66 km/h 0.1 mm High 34
24 Oct 28.0 °C 48 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
25 Oct after 26.9 °C 64 % 54 km/h 1.5 mm Moderate 14
26 Oct after 27.4 °C 59 % 46 km/h 1.0 mm Moderate 15
27 Oct after 28.4 °C 53 % 50 km/h 0.5 mm High 22
28 Oct after 28.1 °C 54 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
29 Oct after 26.3 °C 63 % 49 km/h 0.8 mm Moderate 16
30 Oct after 26.7 °C 52 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
31 Oct after 27.7 °C 50 % 47 km/h 0.1 mm High 24
1 Nov after 28.3 °C 47 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
2 Nov after 27.9 °C 50 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
3 Nov after 28.3 °C 48 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
4 Nov after 28.7 °C 41 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
5 Nov after 28.0 °C 43 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
6 Nov after 29.1 °C 42 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 31

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 27 Sept 2019
After · 31 Oct 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 · 499Every 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 4 October 2019 and 24 October 2019: 21 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 9,701 hectares (97.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Cook (9,763 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 30.6 °C, humidity dropped to 33 % and gusts hit 67 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 38, class 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. 499 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.