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Cook fire, 3 October 2020 Cook

Out · last detection 25 Oct 2020, 03:35 UTC

The fire started on 3 October 2020 in Cook, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 23 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 25,573 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 230th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 26 in Australia in 2020, of 320.

Compare with…

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

Burnt area
25,573ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
23days
3 Oct 2020 – 25 Oct 2020
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
3 Oct
2020
Heat detections
1,369
in a single hotspot: 108 MW
Danger at start
33
High · FWI index
Average daily power
415MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 3 Oct25 Oct
25 Oct 2020

How it evolved, day by day

3 Oct 2020 · 43 MW · 5 4 Oct 2020 · 99 MW · 20 5 Oct 2020 · 113 MW · 19 6 Oct 2020 · 126 MW · 29 7 Oct 2020 · 67 MW · 34 8 Oct 2020 · 676 MW · 97 9 Oct 2020 · 1,484 MW · 128 10 Oct 2020 · 1,095 MW · 128 11 Oct 2020 · 507 MW · 113 12 Oct 2020 · 543 MW · 127 13 Oct 2020 · 1,444 MW · 198 14 Oct 2020 · 617 MW · 54 15 Oct 2020 · 194 MW · 33 16 Oct 2020 · 134 MW · 29 17 Oct 2020 · 461 MW · 65 18 Oct 2020 · 482 MW · 67 19 Oct 2020 · 528 MW · 46 20 Oct 2020 · 122 MW · 20 21 Oct 2020 · 110 MW · 19 22 Oct 2020 · 127 MW · 38 23 Oct 2020 · 168 MW · 33 24 Oct 2020 · 365 MW · 61 25 Oct 2020 · 35 MW · 6
3 Oct 7 Oct 9 Oct 11 Oct 15 Oct 19 Oct 23 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

33°high
79km/h · peak gust
34%lowest humidity

It had gone 12 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 2.0 mm on 26 Oct.

This area had burned before

98% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 22,456 ha in 2016, 123 ha in 2017, 7,898 ha in 2018. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 25,127 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 16% of the area of London (256 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
    25,920 ha reached on 3 Oct
    0.2 %

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)
30 Sept 28.3 °C 44 % 68 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
1 Oct 28.7 °C 46 % 63 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
2 Oct 27.7 °C 48 % 74 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
3 Oct 27.7 °C 48 % 79 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
4 Oct 27.8 °C 47 % 68 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
5 Oct 28.5 °C 47 % 62 km/h 0.1 mm High 32
6 Oct 28.7 °C 40 % 58 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
7 Oct 29.0 °C 45 % 56 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
8 Oct 29.6 °C 40 % 56 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
9 Oct 30.3 °C 34 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
10 Oct 30.0 °C 41 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
11 Oct 27.2 °C 62 % 59 km/h 1.0 mm Moderate 18
12 Oct 28.8 °C 53 % 61 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
13 Oct 30.3 °C 47 % 62 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
14 Oct 27.4 °C 59 % 65 km/h 1.1 mm Moderate 19
15 Oct 28.6 °C 45 % 62 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
16 Oct 27.7 °C 52 % 61 km/h 0.2 mm High 28
17 Oct 29.2 °C 41 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
18 Oct 29.3 °C 45 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
19 Oct 31.6 °C 37 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
20 Oct 32.7 °C 39 % 39 km/h 0.1 mm High 28
21 Oct 30.9 °C 40 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
22 Oct 31.0 °C 46 % 43 km/h 0.2 mm High 30
23 Oct 31.9 °C 41 % 42 km/h 0.2 mm High 29
24 Oct 31.2 °C 42 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
25 Oct 32.7 °C 42 % 37 km/h 0.2 mm High 29
26 Oct after 32.8 °C 43 % 38 km/h 2.0 mm Moderate 15

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 26 Sept 2020
After · 1 Nov 2020

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 · 1,369Every 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 3 October 2020 and 25 October 2020: 23 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 25,573 hectares (255.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Cook (25,920 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 32.7 °C, humidity dropped to 34 % and gusts hit 79 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
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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. 1,369 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.