Cook fire, 11 August 2025 Cook
The fire started on 11 August 2025 in Cook, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 13,717 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 528th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 336 in Australia in 2025, of 1124.
Compare with…
Suggestions: Cook · 2023Cook · 2016Cook · 2023Cook · 2019
- Burnt area
- 13,717ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 9days
- 11 Aug 2025 – 19 Aug 2025
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- local government areas
- Started on
- 11 Aug
- 2025
- Heat detections
- 519
- in a single hotspot: 40 MW
- Danger at start
- 29
- High · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 284MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
It had gone 5 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.
This area had burned before
86% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,729 ha in 2016, 519 ha in 2017, 18 ha in 2018, 6,257 ha in 2019, 1,937 ha in 2020, 2,244 ha in 2022, 6,646 ha in 2023, 36 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 11,813 ha that had burned before.
- 5,035 ha Cook fire, August 2023 29,346 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 1,729 ha Cook fire, November 2016 7,206 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 452 ha Cook fire, July 2023 5,860 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 440 ha Cook fire, August 2019 95,928 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
Cook where it started13,950 ha reached on 7 Aug0.1 %
Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance is from the town centre 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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7 Aug | 28.4 °C | 41 % | 42 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 29 |
| 8 Aug | 28.3 °C | 46 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 25 |
| 9 Aug | 30.4 °C | 32 % | 26 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 25 |
| 10 Aug | 28.1 °C | 42 % | 30 km/h | 0.5 mm | High 26 |
| 11 Aug | 27.8 °C | 42 % | 38 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 28 |
| 12 Aug | 28.3 °C | 42 % | 42 km/h | 0.1 mm | High 31 |
| 13 Aug | 26.9 °C | 49 % | 49 km/h | 0.3 mm | High 28 |
| 14 Aug | 29.1 °C | 33 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 29 |
| 15 Aug | 27.8 °C | 32 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 30 |
| 16 Aug | 28.9 °C | 26 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 31 |
| 17 Aug | 29.6 °C | 22 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 37 |
| 18 Aug | 30.4 °C | 22 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 37 |
| 19 Aug | 29.9 °C | 27 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 36 |
| 20 Aug after | 31.6 °C | 31 % | 38 km/h | 0.1 mm | High 38 |
| 21 Aug after | 31.4 °C | 44 % | 46 km/h | 0.1 mm | High 33 |
| 22 Aug after | 31.8 °C | 41 % | 42 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 33 |
| 23 Aug after | 33.9 °C | 23 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 38 |
| 24 Aug after | 33.5 °C | 19 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 43 |
| 25 Aug after | 32.3 °C | 25 % | 46 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 48 |
| 26 Aug after | 32.5 °C | 23 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 27 Aug after | 33.2 °C | 26 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 40 |
| 28 Aug after | 34.2 °C | 27 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 38 |
| 29 Aug after | 35.5 °C | 23 % | 32 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 43 |
| 30 Aug after | 32.6 °C | 26 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 39 |
| 31 Aug after | 31.1 °C | 25 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 44 |
| 1 Sept after | 32.2 °C | 23 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very high 43 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
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 · CopernicusOn 16 August 2025 the air beside the fire reached 22 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).
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 · 519Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Cook fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 11 August 2025 and 19 August 2025: 9 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 13,717 hectares (137.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Cook (13,950 ha, 0.1 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 31.8 °C, humidity dropped to 22 % and gusts hit 49 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 38, 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
Satellite cross-check
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
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. 519 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.
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.