Cook fire, 25 May 2026 Cook
The fire started on 25 May 2026 in Cook, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,863 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 1440th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 687 in Australia in 2026, of 859.
Compare with…
Suggestions: Cook · 2022Cook · 2023
- Burnt area
- 5,863ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 9days
- 25 May 2026 – 2 Jun 2026
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- local government areas
- Started on
- 25 May
- 2026
- Heat detections
- 118
- in a single hotspot: 43 MW
- Danger at start
- 26
- High · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 282MW
- 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 15 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.
This area had burned before
75% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 31 ha in 2016, 162 ha in 2017, 1,541 ha in 2018, 1,720 ha in 2019, 9 ha in 2021, 1,913 ha in 2022, 446 ha in 2023, 1,507 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 4,370 ha that had burned before.
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 started5,932 ha reached on 25 May0.1 %
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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 May | 29.4 °C | 47 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 26 |
| 26 May | 29.4 °C | 45 % | 21 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 22 |
| 27 May | 30.6 °C | 40 % | 20 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 23 |
| 28 May | 29.6 °C | 40 % | 24 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 26 |
| 29 May | 29.4 °C | 33 % | 20 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 25 |
| 30 May | 29.5 °C | 41 % | 18 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 25 |
| 31 May | 29.8 °C | 27 % | 19 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 28 |
| 1 Jun | 30.0 °C | 40 % | 26 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 30 |
| 2 Jun | 30.1 °C | 40 % | 26 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 29 |
| 3 Jun after | 30.7 °C | 39 % | 20 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 28 |
| 4 Jun after | 30.7 °C | 37 % | 20 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 26 |
| 5 Jun after | 29.9 °C | 32 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 31 |
| 6 Jun after | 29.5 °C | 39 % | 32 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 33 |
| 7 Jun after | 28.6 °C | 35 % | 42 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 36 |
| 8 Jun after | 28.6 °C | 44 % | 48 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 35 |
| 9 Jun after | 30.2 °C | 39 % | 52 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 38 |
| 10 Jun after | 29.1 °C | 48 % | 50 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 36 |
| 11 Jun after | 30.3 °C | 47 % | 46 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 33 |
| 12 Jun after | 31.1 °C | 38 % | 46 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 34 |
| 13 Jun after | 29.6 °C | 42 % | 44 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 34 |
| 14 Jun after | 28.3 °C | 46 % | 43 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 33 |
| 15 Jun after | 30.0 °C | 41 % | 49 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 37 |
| 16 Jun after | 29.5 °C | 44 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 32 |
| 17 Jun after | 28.8 °C | 50 % | 48 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 31 |
| 18 Jun after | 30.8 °C | 34 % | 40 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 35 |
| 19 Jun after | 30.0 °C | 45 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 32 |
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 1 June 2026 the air beside the fire reached 18 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 · 118Every 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 25 May 2026 and 2 June 2026: 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 5,863 hectares (58.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Cook (5,932 ha, 0.1 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 30.7 °C, humidity dropped to 27 % and gusts hit 52 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. 118 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.