Scientists are looking at the 40,000-foot-tall clouds pumped out by the Mosquito Fire

San Francisco Chronicle / SFGate.com ^ | Updated: Sep. 11, 2022 6:57 a.m. | Amy Graff , SFGATE

[thecodont]

Like a scene out of an apocalyptic movie, a raging California wildfire pumped out a monster cloud towering 40,000 feet into the atmosphere on Thursday. As the Mosquito Fire tore across Tahoe National Forest, making a 5,000-acre run across the American River and pushing into the El Dorado County town of Volcanoville, the cloud grew and grew.

[...]

Alan Brewer, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, got a much closer look from a plane with a team of scientists who were flying along the side of the massive wall of sooty air to better understand fire behavior and its impacts.

“It really hit everybody in the plane pretty hard just how massive and destructive the fire was,” Brewer told SFGATE on the phone. “It was like flying right alongside the wall of the Grand Canyon.”

[...]

Researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, San Jose State University and the University of Nevada conducted research on the massive fire cloud emitted by California's Mosquito Fire on Thursday.

These so-called pyrocumulus clouds are formed when air around a fire heats up, creating an updraft that pushes smoke, ash and moisture upward. They usually appear over a fire in the afternoon, when daytime temperatures peak and afternoon winds pick up. When fires are especially large, the clouds can grow so high into the freezing-cold atmosphere that ice crystals form in the top layer. These larger pyrocumulonimbus clouds can generate their own weather, including lightning, hail and strong winds. The clouds generated by the fire on both Wednesday and Thursday fell into this category. Both of these types of clouds are a sign of severe fire activity and growth on the ground.

[forester]

50 years of liberal environmental policy up in smoke. They are not preservationists - they are destroyers. The environmental movement hasn’t “saved” a damn thing - but they have been spectacularly successfull at destroying our forests here in California.