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Cook fire, 23 October 2021 Cook

Out · last detection 3 Nov 2021, 03:24 UTC

The fire started on 23 October 2021 in Cook, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 16,606 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 397th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1742 with a page). Number 96 in Australia in 2021, of 460.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Cook · 2016Cook · 2017Cook · 2021Cook · 2021

Burnt area
16,606ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
12days
23 Oct 2021 – 3 Nov 2021
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
23 Oct
2021
Heat detections
539
in a single hotspot: 88 MW
Danger at start
42
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
406MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 23 Oct3 Nov
3 Nov 2021

How it evolved, day by day

23 Oct 2021 · 61 MW · 9 24 Oct 2021 · 917 MW · 77 25 Oct 2021 · 195 MW · 40 26 Oct 2021 · 397 MW · 67 27 Oct 2021 · 307 MW · 57 28 Oct 2021 · 256 MW · 36 29 Oct 2021 · 292 MW · 64 30 Oct 2021 · 2,049 MW · 132 31 Oct 2021 · 199 MW · 18 1 Nov 2021 · 120 MW · 25 2 Nov 2021 · 65 MW · 10 3 Nov 2021 · 14 MW · 4
23 Oct 25 Oct 27 Oct 29 Oct 30 Oct 31 Oct 2 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
55km/h · peak gust
27%lowest humidity

It had gone 7 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 3.3 mm on 12 Nov.

This area had burned before

38% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 3,151 ha in 2016, 3,259 ha in 2017, 97 ha in 2019.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 10% of the area of London (166 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
    16,735 ha reached on 23 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)
23 Oct 35.7 °C 28 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
24 Oct 34.4 °C 31 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
25 Oct 35.8 °C 33 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
26 Oct 36.8 °C 27 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
27 Oct 35.3 °C 30 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
28 Oct 34.9 °C 31 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
29 Oct 35.9 °C 30 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
30 Oct 35.9 °C 32 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
31 Oct 36.3 °C 33 % 41 km/h 0.1 mm Very high 42
1 Nov 34.9 °C 40 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
2 Nov 35.3 °C 27 % 55 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
3 Nov 36.2 °C 30 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
4 Nov after 34.9 °C 33 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
5 Nov after 33.9 °C 34 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
6 Nov after 35.4 °C 33 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
7 Nov after 35.0 °C 45 % 38 km/h 0.1 mm High 33
8 Nov after 35.5 °C 38 % 35 km/h 0.9 mm High 30
9 Nov after 35.3 °C 40 % 31 km/h 0.2 mm High 29
10 Nov after 36.7 °C 34 % 39 km/h 0.5 mm High 35
11 Nov after 36.8 °C 33 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
12 Nov after 36.7 °C 39 % 33 km/h 3.3 mm Moderate 17

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 16 Oct 2021
After · 10 Nov 2021

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 · 539Every 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 23 October 2021 and 3 November 2021: 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 16,606 hectares (166.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Cook (16,735 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 36.8 °C, humidity dropped to 27 % and gusts hit 55 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 44, 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
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. 539 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.