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Oh Good, Now There's an Outbreak of Wildfire Thunderclouds - WIRED
Jul 27, 2021 1 min, 50 secs
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Last week, the US Naval Research Laboratory held a very 2021 press conference, in which scientists reported a very 2021 outbreak of “smoke thunderclouds.” Catastrophic wildfires, exacerbated by catastrophic climate change, had produced a rash of pyrocumulonimbus plumes over the western United States and Canada, known in the scientific vernacular as pyroCb.

“You can think of them as like giant chimneys, funneling smoke that's being released by the fire up into a thunderstorm,” said David Peterson, a meteorologist at the research laboratory, during the Zoom press conference.

So not only can the blaze propagate itself by flinging embers ahead of the main fire line (California’s wildfires are so deadly in part because of strong seasonal winds that push them at incredible speeds), it can also produce so much hot, rising smoke that it in essence recruits the atmosphere to light more fires for it.

“So we're talking 50, 60,000 feet, potentially.” In fact, he says, the smoke will actually pour into the atmosphere's next layer, the stratosphere, which is above where weather typically occurs.

But the plume itself will absorb the sun’s energy, warming the air locally to create a “thermal bubble.” This creates an atmospheric engine that drives a circulation of the smoke, what scientists have dubbed a “swirl.” “So that little engine event, created by virtue of putting smoke in the stratosphere, leads to its own stratospheric weather,” said Mike Fromm, of the remote sensing division at US Naval Research Laboratory, during the press conference.

At the end of June, Peterson and Fromm tracked one of the largest pyroCb plumes ever recorded in North America.

A very intense fire burning under a stable atmosphere won’t produce a pyroCb?

Another reason we might be seeing more of these plumes, he says, is that wildfires are simply getting bigger and hotter.

This probably won’t be the last of the US Naval Research Laboratory’s very 2021 press conferences. 

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