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Cook fire, 16 December 2019 Cook

Out · last detection 20 Dec 2019, 03:48 UTC

The fire started on 16 December 2019 in Cook, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 5 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,824 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1195th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 566 in Australia in 2019, of 802.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Cook · 2018Cook · 2026Cook · 2023Cook · 2026

Burnt area
6,824ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
5days
16 Dec 2019 – 20 Dec 2019
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
16 Dec
2019
Heat detections
276
in a single hotspot: 109 MW
Danger at start
24
High · FWI index
Average daily power
814MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 16 Dec20 Dec
20 Dec 2019

How it evolved, day by day

16 Dec 2019 · 314 MW · 22 17 Dec 2019 · 2,680 MW · 141 18 Dec 2019 · 530 MW · 65 19 Dec 2019 · 172 MW · 23 20 Dec 2019 · 372 MW · 19
16 Dec 17 Dec 18 Dec 19 Dec 20 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
49km/h · peak gust
24%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 26.6 mm on 26 Dec.

This area had burned before

18% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 123 ha in 2016, 978 ha in 2017, 170 ha in 2018.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 4.3% of the area of London (68 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
    6,864 ha reached on 16 Dec
    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)
16 Dec 35.3 °C 39 % 36 km/h 0.3 mm High 24
17 Dec 37.3 °C 24 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
18 Dec 34.4 °C 36 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
19 Dec 32.9 °C 48 % 49 km/h 0.2 mm High 30
20 Dec 35.2 °C 37 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
21 Dec after 35.5 °C 34 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
22 Dec after 32.9 °C 52 % 41 km/h 0.4 mm High 27
23 Dec after 34.8 °C 37 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
24 Dec after 35.5 °C 38 % 36 km/h 0.1 mm High 28
25 Dec after 37.2 °C 31 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
26 Dec after 34.7 °C 52 % 33 km/h 26.6 mm Very low 3

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 9 Dec 2019
After · 27 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 · 276Every 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 16 December 2019 and 20 December 2019: 5 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 6,824 hectares (68.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Cook (6,864 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 37.3 °C, humidity dropped to 24 % and gusts hit 49 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 38, 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
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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. 276 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.