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Cook fire, 22 November 2019 Cook

Out · last detection 9 Dec 2019, 15:03 UTC

The fire started on 22 November 2019 in Cook, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 18 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 11,846 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 628th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 326 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Cook · 2016Cook · 2016Cook · 2023Cook · 2021

Burnt area
11,846ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
18days
22 Nov 2019 – 9 Dec 2019
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
22 Nov
2019
Heat detections
472
in a single hotspot: 61 MW
Danger at start
37
High · FWI index
Average daily power
273MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 22 Nov9 Dec
9 Dec 2019

How it evolved, day by day

22 Nov 2019 · 10 MW · 10 23 Nov 2019 · 376 MW · 37 24 Nov 2019 · 344 MW · 28 25 Nov 2019 · 91 MW · 19 27 Nov 2019 · 50 MW · 12 28 Nov 2019 · 70 MW · 10 29 Nov 2019 · 64 MW · 8 30 Nov 2019 · 30 MW · 7 1 Dec 2019 · 12 MW · 6 2 Dec 2019 · 82 MW · 6 3 Dec 2019 · 73 MW · 9 5 Dec 2019 · 111 MW · 13 6 Dec 2019 · 324 MW · 39 7 Dec 2019 · 1,186 MW · 83 8 Dec 2019 · 1,211 MW · 139 9 Dec 2019 · 339 MW · 46
22 Nov 25 Nov 29 Nov 2 Dec 6 Dec 8 Dec 9 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

37°high
48km/h · peak gust
30%lowest humidity

It had gone 27 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.3 mm on 15 Dec.

This area had burned before

12% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 722 ha in 2016, 872 ha in 2017. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,400 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 7.5% of the area of London (118 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
    11,953 ha reached on 22 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)
22 Nov 32.1 °C 35 % 48 km/h 0.2 mm High 37
23 Nov 31.8 °C 38 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
24 Nov 33.0 °C 37 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
25 Nov 31.3 °C 50 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
26 Nov 33.5 °C 40 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
27 Nov 32.1 °C 44 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
28 Nov 32.1 °C 38 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
29 Nov 31.5 °C 43 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
30 Nov 32.9 °C 44 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
1 Dec 34.0 °C 42 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
2 Dec 34.3 °C 46 % 36 km/h 2.0 mm Moderate 16
3 Dec 34.9 °C 44 % 33 km/h 0.7 mm High 22
4 Dec 33.4 °C 50 % 39 km/h 0.6 mm High 24
5 Dec 32.7 °C 52 % 37 km/h 1.3 mm Moderate 17
6 Dec 33.4 °C 40 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
7 Dec 33.2 °C 40 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
8 Dec 33.9 °C 33 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
9 Dec 33.6 °C 34 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
10 Dec after 33.9 °C 45 % 46 km/h 1.6 mm Moderate 20
11 Dec after 35.4 °C 39 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
12 Dec after 34.9 °C 41 % 44 km/h 0.9 mm High 25
13 Dec after 36.8 °C 30 % 39 km/h 1.2 mm High 33
14 Dec after 36.1 °C 37 % 32 km/h 0.3 mm High 30
15 Dec after 31.8 °C 55 % 34 km/h 2.3 mm Low 10

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 15 Nov 2019
After · 16 Dec 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 · 472Every 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 22 November 2019 and 9 December 2019: 18 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 11,846 hectares (118.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Cook (11,953 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 36.8 °C, humidity dropped to 30 % and gusts hit 48 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 37, 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. 472 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.