The present study investigates the fire suppression characteristics using a water mist fire suppression system. The fire extinguishing times are measured for various fire sources, fuel types, and different total flooding rates of water mist. Pool fire with hydrocabon fuel is successfully extinguished within a minute under the operating conditions of the water mist system. Two different regimes of the smoke layer cooling are observed, such as rapid and slow cooling processes. The regimes are divided by threshold time which is calculated with auto-correlation function. The threshold time for the initial cooling decreases with increasing water flow-rates and fire sources. These initial cooling effects play an important role in preventing the occurance of flashover fire by the initial fire suppression.