How long did the Cook fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 11 November 2019 and 22 November 2019: 12 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 13,775 hectares (137.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Cook (13,780 ha, 0.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 37.3 °C, humidity dropped to 25 % and gusts hit 43 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 41, 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 · 2019-11-11 → 2019-11-22

Cook fire, 11 November 2019 Cook

Out · last detection 22 Nov 2019, 15:21 UTC

The fire started on 11 November 2019 in Cook, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 13,775 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 524th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 265 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Cook · 2016 Cook · 2016 Cook · 2018 Cook · 2026

Burnt area: 13,775ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 12days; 11 Nov 2019 – 22 Nov 2019
Municipalities hit: 1; local government areas
Started on: 11 Nov; 2019
Heat detections: 459; in a single hotspot: 92 MW
Danger at start: 36; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 306MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 11 Nov22 Nov

Play back 22 Nov 2019

How it evolved, day by day

11 Nov 13 Nov 15 Nov 17 Nov 19 Nov 21 Nov

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

The weather it burned in

37°high

43km/h · peak gust

25%lowest humidity

It had gone 15 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.3 mm on 2 Dec.

This area had burned before

56% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 7,217 ha in 2016, 105 ha in 2017, 1,352 ha in 2018. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 7,684 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 8.7% of the area of London (138 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

13,780 ha reached on 11 Nov

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)
11 Nov	35.0 °C	30 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
12 Nov	34.6 °C	29 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
13 Nov	35.0 °C	29 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
14 Nov	37.3 °C	27 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
15 Nov	35.2 °C	30 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
16 Nov	35.8 °C	32 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
17 Nov	36.8 °C	29 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
18 Nov	36.1 °C	29 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
19 Nov	35.7 °C	30 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
20 Nov	37.0 °C	25 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 41
21 Nov	36.0 °C	28 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
22 Nov	35.3 °C	33 %	31 km/h	0.8 mm	High 29
23 Nov after	34.9 °C	32 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
24 Nov after	35.3 °C	34 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
25 Nov after	34.8 °C	37 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
26 Nov after	36.1 °C	32 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
27 Nov after	35.8 °C	34 %	32 km/h	0.1 mm	High 31
28 Nov after	35.1 °C	32 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
29 Nov after	35.3 °C	31 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
30 Nov after	33.9 °C	43 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
1 Dec after	35.2 °C	42 %	27 km/h	0.3 mm	High 31
2 Dec after	35.3 °C	46 %	30 km/h	1.3 mm	Moderate 20

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 4 Nov 2019

After · 29 Nov 2019

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 · 459Every 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 11 November 2019 and 22 November 2019: 12 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 13,775 hectares (137.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Cook (13,780 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 37.3 °C, humidity dropped to 25 % and gusts hit 43 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 41, 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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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. 459 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.

Where it burned