‘Fire clouds’ that spit lightning are now something we need to worry about

It's important we understand 'fire clouds' better, as we are going to see a lot more of them.

Wildfires raging across the US and Canada recently were so huge they even spread to the sky, creating clouds that only appear above superhot heat sources.

So-called ‘fire clouds’ are not literally made of flames, but as thunder clouds they have the potential to spit out lightning and spark still more fires on the ground.

These ‘pyrocumulonimbus’ clouds are towering formations formed by the updraft from incredibly intense fires comparable to volcanic eruptions, which also cause the phenomenon.

Something like a house fire would have nowhere near the heat needed to create them, but huge wildfires which become an inferno burn so hot they can literally create their own weather systems.

A study in Nature journal last month warns that when such clouds appear, they can inject ‘significant amounts of black carbon to the stratosphere’ which can linger there for several months.

While there, it is ‘a strong absorber of incoming light and one of the most potent short-lived climate warmers’ making days warmed and drier – which can sustain fires for longer.

Authors warned that large-scale wildfires ‘are expected to increase in frequency due to climatic changes such as warmer springs, longer dry seasons, drier soils, and drier vegetation’.

So it’s important we understand ‘fire clouds’ and their impacts better, as we are going to see more of them.

A growing problem

Australia saw a particularly extreme outbreak in 2019/2020 known as its Black Summer, when there was an intense ‘super outbreak’ of fire-induced and smoke-infused thunderstorms.

Out of 38 pyrocumulonimbus ‘fire clouds’ observed by researchers, half of them injected smoke particles directly into the stratosphere, ‘producing two of the three largest smoke plumes observed at such altitudes to date’.

The recent Jasper Fire in Canada and Park Fire in California caused such clouds to appear. Both 2023 and 2024 have seen higher than usual numbers of what used to be a relatively rare occurence.

It’s not only far afield from the UK that this extreme fire-triggered weather has been seen.

In Portugal in 2017, five ‘fire clouds’ were observed in a year of unforgiving wildfires, where at least 120 people lost their lives.

As well as fire clouds, the health issues of wildfire smoke entering the atmosphere are well-documented.

Only last week, a new study linked particles spread by wildfire pollution to increased rates of Alzheimer’s disease.

Europe has seen more and more wildfires in recent years, with headlines of forests burning in the Mediterranean becoming a regular occurrence each summer.

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