Meteorologists and atmospheric scientists were flabbergasted by the recent record-obliterating heat in the Pacific Northwest and Canada. Some records broke by 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
“It’s a staggering event,” Jeff Weber, a research meteorologist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, told Mashable.
That profound heat, which smashed Canada’s all-time temperature record and hit 121 degrees — 4 degrees warmer than ever recorded in the desert city of Las Vegas — dried out vegetation and amplified wildfires in British Columbia. Satellites captured the stunning blowup of these fire storms, which produced towering clouds stoked by the fire’s intense smoke and heat.
They’re called pyrocumulonimbus clouds and are powerful, thunderous storms. NASA calls them the “fire-breathing dragon of clouds.”
“I’ve watched a lot of wildfire-associated pyroconvective events during the satellite era, and I think this might be the singularly most extreme I’ve ever seen,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, tweeted Wednesday evening. “This is a literal firestorm, producing *thousands* of lightning strikes and almost certainly countless new fires.”
“Absolutely mind-blowing wildfire behavior in British Columbia,” tweeted Dakota Smith, a satellite analyst at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere.
In a warming world, earth scientists expect increasingly favorable conditions for wildfires. Warmer air parches shrubs, grasses, and even trees, allowing wildfires to spread rapidly and more vigorously. A hotter climate doesn’t create heat waves, but it makes heat waves more severe, meaning more flammable vegetation.
Below, you can see the massive fire-driven clouds, which reach some five miles up into the atmosphere, blowing up on Wednesday evening.
The Western fire season is just getting started.
