What Do You Get When You Cross a Thunderstorm with a Wildfire?
https://eos.org/articles/what-do-you-get-when-you-cross-a-thunderstorm-with-a-wildfire
Source: By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU.
Excerpt: There are few things more ominous than a looming thundercloud. Add a wildfire to the mix, and the result can be a towering tempest of thick smoke, smoldering embers, and superheated air. Fire-fueled thunderstorms are naturally occurring weather systems that sometimes spin up as a result of smoke and heat billowing from intense wildfires. These extreme storms, called pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb), occur infrequently, but when they do they can lead to tragic results. The Making of a Fire Storm [:] Wildfires give off intense heat, forcing large amounts of smoke and hot air to rise. As the mixture moves higher into the troposphere—the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere—it cools and expands as the air pressure drops. Moisture in the air soon condenses, forming big puffy clouds called pyrocumulus clouds. When conditions in the atmosphere are just right—including a hot, dry layer of air near the ground and a cooler, wetter layer above it—the atmosphere can become convectively unstable. Increasingly turbulent air sets water droplets and ice crystals in pyrocumulus clouds on a collision course, building up an electrical charge and turning the system into a towering thunderhead. The soaring pyroCbs, which rarely produce rain on the ground even though they are thunderstorms, can even rise out of the troposphere and extend into the stratosphere tens of kilometers above the surface. ...A pyroCb that formed during the Carr Fire near Redding, Calif., in 2018 had such strong winds that it created a tornado-strength fire vortex, and a pyroCb in Canberra, Australia, in 2003 was so extreme that it released a torrent of black hail and turned the daytime sky as dark as night. Fortunately, these events are still relatively rare, although recent research from Australia suggests that climate change may cause conditions there to become more favorable for the formation of pyroCbs in the future....
Source: By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU.
Excerpt: There are few things more ominous than a looming thundercloud. Add a wildfire to the mix, and the result can be a towering tempest of thick smoke, smoldering embers, and superheated air. Fire-fueled thunderstorms are naturally occurring weather systems that sometimes spin up as a result of smoke and heat billowing from intense wildfires. These extreme storms, called pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb), occur infrequently, but when they do they can lead to tragic results. The Making of a Fire Storm [:] Wildfires give off intense heat, forcing large amounts of smoke and hot air to rise. As the mixture moves higher into the troposphere—the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere—it cools and expands as the air pressure drops. Moisture in the air soon condenses, forming big puffy clouds called pyrocumulus clouds. When conditions in the atmosphere are just right—including a hot, dry layer of air near the ground and a cooler, wetter layer above it—the atmosphere can become convectively unstable. Increasingly turbulent air sets water droplets and ice crystals in pyrocumulus clouds on a collision course, building up an electrical charge and turning the system into a towering thunderhead. The soaring pyroCbs, which rarely produce rain on the ground even though they are thunderstorms, can even rise out of the troposphere and extend into the stratosphere tens of kilometers above the surface. ...A pyroCb that formed during the Carr Fire near Redding, Calif., in 2018 had such strong winds that it created a tornado-strength fire vortex, and a pyroCb in Canberra, Australia, in 2003 was so extreme that it released a torrent of black hail and turned the daytime sky as dark as night. Fortunately, these events are still relatively rare, although recent research from Australia suggests that climate change may cause conditions there to become more favorable for the formation of pyroCbs in the future....