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Cook fire, 6 June 2023 Cook

Out · last detection 13 Jun 2023, 03:18 UTC

The fire started on 6 June 2023 in Cook, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 8 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,237 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1630th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 1178 in Australia in 2023, of 1235.

The power measured by the satellite is low (14.0 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Cook · 2016Cook · 2024Cook · 2016Cook · 2021

Burnt area
5,237ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
8days
6 Jun 2023 – 13 Jun 2023
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
6 Jun
2023
Heat detections
192
in a single hotspot: 14 MW
Danger at start
32
High · FWI index
Average daily power
84MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 6 Jun13 Jun
13 Jun 2023

How it evolved, day by day

6 Jun 2023 · 96 MW · 15 7 Jun 2023 · 10 MW · 13 8 Jun 2023 · 59 MW · 28 9 Jun 2023 · 126 MW · 37 10 Jun 2023 · 161 MW · 55 11 Jun 2023 · 141 MW · 33 12 Jun 2023 · 69 MW · 9 13 Jun 2023 · 14 MW · 2
6 Jun 8 Jun 10 Jun 12 Jun

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

The weather it burned in

32°high
53km/h · peak gust
35%lowest humidity

It had gone 46 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

89% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 3,956 ha in 2016, 870 ha in 2017, 7 ha in 2019, 2,309 ha in 2020, 35 ha in 2022. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 4,655 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 3.3% of the area of London (52 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
    5,293 ha reached on 6 Jun
    0.0 %

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.

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)
6 Jun 31.9 °C 52 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
7 Jun 31.5 °C 47 % 52 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
8 Jun 31.7 °C 38 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
9 Jun 30.5 °C 35 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
10 Jun 30.8 °C 37 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
11 Jun 31.5 °C 41 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
12 Jun 31.7 °C 40 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
13 Jun 32.0 °C 37 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
14 Jun after 31.2 °C 41 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
15 Jun after 29.9 °C 45 % 31 km/h 0.4 mm High 30
16 Jun after 31.2 °C 41 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
17 Jun after 30.3 °C 44 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
18 Jun after 28.6 °C 51 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
19 Jun after 29.5 °C 45 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
20 Jun after 30.2 °C 41 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
21 Jun after 30.4 °C 43 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
22 Jun after 30.6 °C 46 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
23 Jun after 31.1 °C 41 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 30

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 30 May 2023
After · 20 Jun 2023

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 13 June 2023 the air beside the fire reached 11 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak11 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1017 µg/m³
Optical depth0.28
45678910111213141516
Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

Particles from the Copernicus CAMS model at the centre of the perimeter; these are not measurements in each town. The pale bar is the worst hour, the solid one the daily average.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)

Detections table · 192Every 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 6 June 2023 and 13 June 2023: 8 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 5,237 hectares (52.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Cook (5,293 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 32.0 °C, humidity dropped to 35 % and gusts hit 53 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 33, 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. 192 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.

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.