Storm-producing fire clouds threw out hundreds of thousands of lightning strikes over wildfire-stricken British Columbia and northwestern Alberta provinces in Canada Wednesday and Thursday, bewildering meteorologists.

Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist with the company Vaisala, which maps lightning strikes around in the world, said the North American Lightning Detection Network sensed 710,177 lightning events across British Columbia and northwestern Alberta in about 15 hours, between 3 p.m. on June 30 and 6 a.m. on July 1.

Of those, 597,314 were in-cloud pulses, meaning the strikes didn't hit the ground. "Each in-cloud lightning 'strike' can be made up of multiple in-cloud pulses," Vagasky explained.

There were 112,803 cloud-to-ground strokes detected over the same area, he said.

Vagasky called the numbers "surprising" for Canada. "In studying lightning, there is always something interesting that comes up, whether it is lightning in a hurricane or volcano, or large numbers of lightning," he said. "As a whole, Canada doesn’t generally see a lot of lightning — about 90% less than the United States. In fact, the counts from yesterday are more what you would expect to see in a big day over lightning-prone regions like Texas or Oklahoma."

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Australia’s most recent wildfire season was so severe that smoke from the fires reached new heights in the atmosphere. And this lofted smoke at times behaved weirdly.

Bushfires raged across Australia from December 29 to January 4. The fires fueled huge thunderclouds. Scientists call describe them as pyrocumulonimbus (PY-roh-kew-yu-lo-NIM-bus). Those clouds drew between 300,000 and 900,000 metric tons of smoke into the stratosphere. That’s more smoke than seen from any previous inferno.

Scientists Say: Firewhirl and Firenado

As winds whirled it around, one large, long-lasting smoke plume rose to record heights. Such winds have never been seen around similar plumes. Researchers reported their findings online May 30 in Geophysical Research Letters.

This vast puff of smoke spanned roughly 1,000 kilometers (620 miles). That’s about the width of Montana. It was one of the largest wildfire smoke plumes ever seen in the stratosphere, says Jessica Smith. She is an atmospheric scientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., and not involved in the study. The smoke didn’t mix with the air around it for months after it formed. That may be because the plume was shielded by winds that whirled around it at 54 kilometers (33 miles) per hour, the researchers say. The team is still trying to figure out what whipped up this newly discovered wind event.

Thunderclouds driven by wildfires in Australia around New Year 2020 injected a massive smoke plume into the stratosphere. In less than two months, the plume rose to a record height of 31 kilometers (19 miles). This satellite image taken on January 6 shows the smoke (brownish-gray, center) north of New Zealand (bottom left). CREDIT: SPACE SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING CENTER AT THE UNIV. OF WISCONSIN PYROCB BLOG

Another striking thing was how high the smoke rose, notes George “Pat” Kablick III. Solar heating caused the plume to rise, he says. Kablick is an atmospheric scientist who works at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. In a matter of weeks, the plume climbed from about 15 kilometers (9 miles) off the ground to more than 31 kilometers high.

The rising plume lifted up record amounts of water and carbon monoxide. It also displaced ozone-rich air in the stratosphere. That smoke could also trigger chemical reactions that destroy ozone. That’s concerned some scientists. They worry that too much smoke could damage the ozone layer, which protects Earth from the sun’s harmful radiation.

Future satellites or weather balloons could provide data on whether this has happened, says Pengfei Yu. He is a climate scientist at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China.

Observing the plume’s behavior may give also help scientists picture what might happen if far more smoke were pumped into the atmosphere — say, from a nuclear war.

Explainer: What is a computer model?

Smoke released by wildfires in the Pacific Northwest in 2017 have already helped confirm computer models of nuclear warfare, says Alan Robock. He is a climate scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. Those models predicted that smoke from burning cities would heat up in the stratosphere. That’s the layer of air above where Earth’s weather occurs.

If the heated smoke rose high enough, it could last for years and pose a real threat to the ozone layer. Scientists saw smoke from the 2017 wildfires rise up through the atmosphere just like that.

Eerie 'Fire Cloud' Floats Like Alien Structure Over Washington

The view from inside a pyrocumulonimbus, or fire cloud, is an otherworldly sight.