βWildfires and record temperatures in Canada are generating βfire-breathingβ pyrocumulonimbus thunderstorms.β
βAbsolutely mind-blowing wildfire behavior in British Columbia. Incredible & massive storm-producing pyrocumulonimbus plumes.β [From: Dakota Smith,Β Dakota Smith, meteorologist at Coloradoβs Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, 30 June 2021.]
βPyrocumulonimbus: a new word to learn in 2021. It means fires so big and hot they create storm clouds, which shoot out lightning that starts new fires.β
The Pacific Northwestβs hell is just beginning. After being seared by record heat, the fires arrived with a roar.
In what is one of the most unprecedented displays of fire weather on record, lightning lit up British Columbia on Wednesday [30 June 2021]. Data shows a staggering 710,117 lightning bolts β 5% of all of Canadaβs lightning in an average year β formed over the province and parts of Alberta. The concentrated display was caused in part by fires already burning on the ground that were so intense, they created their own weather system. [β¦]
βThe potential for things to burn there is extreme if it gets dry enough,β Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said. βItβs bloody well dry enough. The one thing we were all hoping wouldnβt happen happened. Itβs a little hard to wrap the numbers around.β [β¦]
Things turned for the worse late on Wednesday. Lytton, a town that became famous in the preceding days for breaking Canadaβs all-time high temperature three days in a row, burned to the ground. [β¦]
Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist and lightning applications manager at Vaisala, said in an email that the 710,117 lightning events captured by sensors on the ground that are part of the North American Lightning Detection Network included βnearly 113,000 cloud-to-ground strokes.β Some of that lightning was generated by the fires already burning, which created pyrocumulonimbus clouds. [β¦]
Thatβs what happened on Wednesday at a scale thatβs honestly hard to comprehend. The most recent notable example of a lightning-driven firestorm occurred in California last August [2020]. But even thatβs not really a great analog; Vagasky noted that, during that storm, βthere were about 20,000 cloud-to-ground strokesβ over a four-day period β a fraction of what happened in Canada on Wednesday [113,000 cloud-to-ground strokes in one day]. The heat then was also nowhere near as extreme as what the Pacific Northwest just saw.
Swain said some of the satellite imagery shows the clouds reached heights near 60,000 feet (18,288 meters) above the Earthβs surface. That allowed them to punch through the tropopause, a boundary that delineates the lower atmosphere from the stratosphere, and pump smoke into the upper atmosphere. This is extremely rarified fire behavior. βIt essentially looked a lot like a pretty significant volcanic eruption,β Swain said. [β¦]
βThis is going to affect a bunch of tribal areas and Indigenous lands that donβt have the same relatively minimal level of resources these incorporated towns have in BC,β Swain said.Β
Excerpt from: Brian Kahn. ββ'I Suspect It Will Get a Lot Worseβ: Firestorm in British Columbia Helps Spark 710,000 Bolts of Lighting.β Gizmodo. 1 July 2021.
Imagery of pyrocumulonimbus developing in British Columbia, with smoke blanketing the entirety of interior British Columbia (Okanogan and central valley systems in brown color in the middle of the imagery; Pacific coastline and Coast Range to the left; Northern Rockies and Alberta to the right.) Illuminated flashes indicate lighting. Imagery by Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere and NOAA.
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