“Wildfires and record temperatures in Canada are generating ‘fire-breathing’ pyrocumulonimbus thunderstorms.”
“Absolutely mind-blowing
wildfire behavior in British Columbia. Incredible & massive
storm-producing pyrocumulonimbus plumes.” [From: Dakota Smith,
Dakota Smith, meteorologist at Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for
Research in the Atmosphere, 30 June 2021.]
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“Pyrocumulonimbus: 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.”
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Excerpt:
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The Pacific Northwest’s 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 – 5%
of all of Canada’s lightning in an average year – 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.
[…]
“The potential for things to burn there is extreme if it gets dry
enough,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of
California, Los Angeles, said. “It’s bloody well dry enough. The one
thing we were all hoping wouldn’t happen happened. It’s a little hard to
wrap the numbers around.” […]
Things turned for the worse late on Wednesday. Lytton, a town that
became famous in the preceding days for breaking Canada’s all-time high
temperature three days in a row, burned to the ground.
[…]
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 “nearly 113,000 cloud-to-ground strokes.” Some of that
lightning was generated by the fires already burning, which created
pyrocumulonimbus clouds.
[…]
That’s what happened on Wednesday at a scale that’s honestly hard to
comprehend. The most recent notable example of a lightning-driven
firestorm occurred in California last August [2020].
But even that’s not really a great analog; Vagasky noted that, during
that storm, “there were about 20,000 cloud-to-ground strokes” over a
four-day period – 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 Earth’s 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. “It essentially looked a lot like a pretty significant volcanic eruption,” Swain said. […]
“This is going to affect a bunch of tribal areas and Indigenous lands
that don’t have the same relatively minimal level of resources these
incorporated towns have in BC,” Swain said.
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Excerpt from: Brian Kahn. “‘’I Suspect It Will Get a Lot Worse’: Firestorm in British Columbia Helps Spark 710,000 Bolts of Lighting.” Gizmodo. 1 July 2021.
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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.
I believe Gaia has had enough of humanities bullshit.
Oh shit. This is terrifying.
The kids and I talked about what to do on the event of a forrest fire – since forest surrounds our little BC town. We have one road out. Our strategy is head to the lake.
This summer is just starting and I’m already afraid.
