U.S. FIRE `CHANGING THE WEATHER'.
`Fire clouds' creating own thunderstorms
A wildfire roaring through drought-parched Oregon is now so large it covers an area the size of Los Angeles and is generating its own weather.
The so-called “Bootleg Fire” is the largest so far this year in the United States, having already burnt more than 1,372 square kilometres of forest and grassland and displaced more than 2,000 people.
The blaze, which has been burning for more than two weeks, has begun affecting winds and disrupting the surrounding atmosphere.
“The fire is so large and generating so much energy and extreme heat that it's changing the weather,” said Marcus Kauffman, a spokesman for the state forestry department.
“Normally the weather predicts what the fire will do. In this case, the fire is predicting what the weather will do.”
Experts say the blaze is creating pyrocumulus clouds, which form when extreme heat from the flames of a wildfire force the air to rapidly rise, condensing and cooling any moisture on smoke particles produced by the fire. These clouds essentially become their own thunderstorms and can contain lightning and strong winds.
This season has already witnessed the development of numerous such clouds, primarily in Canada. Following a late July heat wave that smashed the Canadian record three days in a row and brought a high temperature of 49.4 C in Lytton, B.C., dozens of extreme fires broke out and brewed fiery severe thunderstorms.
Between June 30 and July 1, nearly three quarters of a million pyrocumulonimbus-sparked lightning strikes rained down on B.C.
“We are fighting the fire aggressively, and there are active efforts to build a containment line wherever it is safe to do so,” Kauffman said.
The amount of landscape charred since the blaze erupted on July 6 grew by another 40,000 acres on Monday to reach a total of almost 340,000 acres, the U.S. Forest Service estimated.
“The Bootleg” is the biggest, by far, of 80 major active wildfires that have collectively burnt nearly 1.2 million acres in 13 states, according to the National Interagency Fire Centre in Boise, Idaho. More than 19,600 firefighters and support personnel are tackling the blazes.
The Dixie Fire, located east of Paradise, Calif., a Butte County city which infamously burned in the Camp Fire on Nov. 8, 2018, killing 86 people, stands at roughly 60,000 acres in size. It's only 15 per cent contained.
The spate of conflagrations, marking a heavier-than-normal start of the western U.S. wildfire season, has coincided with record-shattering heat that has baked much of the region and is blamed for hundreds of deaths.