There was a huge fire in Chisholm, Alberta in 2001, so severe it created its own weather:
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The last time we’ve seen anything like this was the Chisholm fire, which is the most intense fire that we have recorded in the fire record, not just for Alberta, but for Canada and for the world,” says University of Alberta wildfire specialist Mike Flannigan.
The 2001 wildfire that went through the central Alberta hamlet of Chisholm burned at 233,000 kilowatts per metre, Flannigan says. At the 2011 Slave Lake fire, the heat was 33,000 kilowatts per metre. For context, if a fire is burning at 10,000 kilowatts per metre, it’s generally deemed that aircraft water bombing is less — or no longer — effective.
The Beast is what regional fire chief Darby Allen calls the Fort McMurray fire, and it might well be that the Fort McMurray fire is burning as hot as Chisholm, an issue that Flannigan and his team will soon investigate. The two fires already share one other indicator of unprecedented intensity, with both fires producing pyro cumulonimbus clouds, thunder and lightning storms generated by the fire’s smoke column.
https://edmontonjournal.com/news/insigh ... to-explodeThis is now seen as a significant event in the global history of fire thunderstorms:
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In 2001, the Chisholm fire in Alberta, Canada, formed a fire thunderstorm (pyro-cumulonimbus or PyroCb for short). A number of papers were written on this fire that raised key questions, and another detailed case study was sought.
On 8 January 2003 a dry lightning storm lit scores of fires across the Australian Alps. The only previous consideration of a fire thunderstorm was the Berringa fire in Victoria in 1995, which addressed the threat to firefighters if the smoke plume collapsed. It started firefighters and fire managers thinking about what was going on over our heads - that the fire plumes had to monitored, not just the flames.
When the January 2003 alpine fires formed violent pyro-convection, no-one was prepared. There was no predictive capability. These events are still the subject of scientific studies - I go as far as saying that they are the most scientifically important bushfires ever.
From 1978 to 2001, Australia recorded two minor pyroCbs. Since 2001 we have 56 on record (to November 2016), including some of the most intense events, globally. PyroCbs have long been a problem in the forests of the United States, Canada, eastern Russia and Mongolia. They became of problem in Australia in 2001, in western Russia in 2010 and in Europe in 2017. The Black Saturday fires in 2009 had the record for the most intense pyro-convection until August 2017, when the Chezacut fire in British Columbia, Canada, erupted.
Australia has entered the “era of violent pyro-convection”. Bushfires are modelled and predicted based on the assumption of steady-state spread. This includes weather, terrain and vegetation inputs to predict a fire's behaviour. For any inputs, the model gives a unique prediction of what the fire will be doing. This is the basis for all fire service preparedness, fuel management and community protection.
https://www.bnhcrc.com.au/news/2018/pre ... nderstormsWe’ll be hearing a lot more about pyro-cumulonimbus storms in the future.
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