Wildfires Breeding Storms
"The fire is so large and generating so much energy and extreme heat that it's changing the weather.""Normally the weather predicts what the fire will do. In this case, the fire is predicting what the weather will do.""We are fighting the fire aggressively, and there are active efforts to build a containment line wherever it is safe to do so."Marcus Kauffman, spokesman, state forestry department, Oregon
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| A firefighting aircraft drops flame-retarding chemicals on the Bootleg Fire in Bly, Oregon, on July 15. |
Drought-parched Oregon is host to a wildfire so large the area it covers is analogous to the size of Los Angeles. It is so large, its atmospheric impact so affecting that it is being seen to generate its own weather system. The "Bootleg Fire" is so far this year the largest to burn in the United States. No less than 1,372 square kilometres of forest and grassland have been burnt, with more yet to be consumed. Over 2,000 people have been displaced of necessity.
The wildfire, blazing for over two weeks to the present, has now begun affecting winds, disrupting the surrounding atmosphere. The fire is so large it is creating pyrocumulus clouds which can form when extreme heat from flames of a wildfire force air to rise rapidly, then condensing and cooling moisture on smoke particles the fire produces. These resulting clouds then morph into their very own thunderstorms with lightning and strong winds.
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| Smoke from the Bootleg Fire rises behind Bonanza, Oregon, on July 15. |
Numerous such clouds have developed this season, resulting from wildfires, but primarily in Canada, which has been experiencing unusually hot and dry weather conditions, and the usual wildfire season developed earlier than usual, hotter than usual, drier and conducive to hosting greater numbers of wildfires, resulting in evacuations of wildfire-threatened towns. A mid-July heat wave smashed heat records in British Columbia.
A three-day immovable heat dome baked the town of Lytton, B.C. reaching an impossibly record-breaking high temperature of 49.4C, leading to dozens of extreme fires breaking out which then led to fiery, violent thunderstorms. Close to three quarters of a million pyrocumulonimbus-sparked lightening strikes hit British Columbia between June 30 and July 1.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Forest Service estimated that since The Bootleg fire erupted on July 6 the landscape was charred by another 40,000 acres on one day alone, reaching a total of close to 340,000 acres that have gone up in flames. Of 80 major active wildfires, The Bootleg is the largest that has seen a collective burn of nearly 1.2 million acres across 13 states, figures released by the National Interagency Fire Centre in Boise, Idaho confirm.
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| A pyrocumulus cloud from the Bootleg Fire drifts into the air Friday near Bly, Oregon |
Labels: Canada, Dry Weather, Hot, United States, Wildfires
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, July 22, 2021
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