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Cook fire, 8 October 2023 Cook

Out · last detection 7 Nov 2023, 15:09 UTC

The fire started on 8 October 2023 in Cook, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 30 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 27,050 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 202th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 195 in Australia in 2023, of 1235.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Cook · 2018Cook · 2019Cook · 2019Cook · 2022

Burnt area
27,050ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
30days
8 Oct 2023 – 6 Nov 2023
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
8 Oct
2023
Heat detections
1,441
in a single hotspot: 248 MW
Danger at start
13
Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power
432MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 8 Oct6 Nov
7 Nov 2023

How it evolved, day by day

8 Oct 2023 · 286 MW · 25 9 Oct 2023 · 49 MW · 10 10 Oct 2023 · 1,550 MW · 100 11 Oct 2023 · 1,918 MW · 144 13 Oct 2023 · 2 MW · 1 14 Oct 2023 · 795 MW · 63 15 Oct 2023 · 313 MW · 43 16 Oct 2023 · 615 MW · 54 17 Oct 2023 · 367 MW · 64 18 Oct 2023 · 149 MW · 36 19 Oct 2023 · 269 MW · 39 20 Oct 2023 · 229 MW · 67 21 Oct 2023 · 381 MW · 43 22 Oct 2023 · 402 MW · 55 23 Oct 2023 · 287 MW · 41 24 Oct 2023 · 112 MW · 38 25 Oct 2023 · 830 MW · 79 26 Oct 2023 · 558 MW · 90 27 Oct 2023 · 618 MW · 88 28 Oct 2023 · 40 MW · 8 29 Oct 2023 · 25 MW · 18 30 Oct 2023 · 171 MW · 52 31 Oct 2023 · 1,587 MW · 139 1 Nov 2023 · 828 MW · 61 3 Nov 2023 · 41 MW · 8 4 Nov 2023 · 4 MW · 4 5 Nov 2023 · 23 MW · 16 6 Nov 2023 · 23 MW · 12 7 Nov 2023 · 67 MW · 15
8 Oct 11 Oct 14 Oct 19 Oct 24 Oct 29 Oct 4 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

33°high
65km/h · peak gust
31%lowest humidity

It had gone 6 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.2 mm on 14 Nov.

This area had burned before

61% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 416 ha in 2016, 246 ha in 2017, 5,681 ha in 2018, 12,773 ha in 2019, 143 ha in 2020, 675 ha in 2022. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 16,370 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 17% of the area of London (270 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
    27,017 ha reached on 7 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 2025
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2025, 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. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.

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)
6 Oct 29.9 °C 60 % 51 km/h 2.1 mm Moderate 13
7 Oct 31.3 °C 46 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
8 Oct 30.1 °C 47 % 63 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
9 Oct 29.9 °C 53 % 59 km/h 0.3 mm High 29
10 Oct 31.0 °C 48 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
11 Oct 31.8 °C 46 % 57 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
12 Oct 29.8 °C 59 % 65 km/h 0.2 mm High 30
13 Oct 29.6 °C 60 % 55 km/h 0.2 mm High 26
14 Oct 32.8 °C 31 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
15 Oct 32.3 °C 39 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
16 Oct 32.0 °C 43 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
17 Oct 33.3 °C 33 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
18 Oct 32.1 °C 46 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
19 Oct 31.2 °C 53 % 51 km/h 0.3 mm High 31
20 Oct 32.2 °C 39 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
21 Oct 31.4 °C 42 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
22 Oct 32.4 °C 40 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
23 Oct 32.1 °C 40 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
24 Oct 31.9 °C 41 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
25 Oct 31.5 °C 44 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
26 Oct 32.1 °C 49 % 45 km/h 0.3 mm High 30
27 Oct 33.3 °C 45 % 38 km/h 0.1 mm High 30
28 Oct 32.5 °C 52 % 55 km/h 1.0 mm High 25
29 Oct 30.6 °C 55 % 55 km/h 0.4 mm High 27
30 Oct 31.2 °C 45 % 57 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
31 Oct 31.9 °C 44 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
1 Nov 31.5 °C 45 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
2 Nov 32.8 °C 43 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
3 Nov 31.9 °C 47 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
4 Nov 32.1 °C 45 % 54 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
5 Nov 32.1 °C 46 % 53 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
6 Nov 32.2 °C 44 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
7 Nov after 31.9 °C 48 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
8 Nov after 32.7 °C 47 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
9 Nov after 32.0 °C 47 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
10 Nov after 31.6 °C 45 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
11 Nov after 32.2 °C 41 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
12 Nov after 31.8 °C 43 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
13 Nov after 31.6 °C 47 % 39 km/h 0.5 mm High 31
14 Nov after 31.8 °C 55 % 38 km/h 1.2 mm Moderate 18

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 1 Oct 2023
After · 13 Nov 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 22 October 2023 the air beside the fire reached 20 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak20 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1031 µg/m³
Optical depth0.38
678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031123456789
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 · 1,441Every 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 8 October 2023 and 6 November 2023: 30 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 27,050 hectares (270.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Cook (27,017 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 33.3 °C, humidity dropped to 31 % and gusts hit 65 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 34, 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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 1,441 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 2025, 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.