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Driven by strong winds, the blaze has chewed through desiccated plants, spewing smoke high into the atmosphere.
PyroCbs can produce lightning that goes on to spark more fires around the very blaze that made the clouds.
A pyrocumulonimbus cloud from the California Park Fire© Carlos Avila Gonzalez / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
These pyroCbs create their own fire weather.
The Park Fire has grown massive on a diet of extra-dry fuel.
Such a big and intense fire is a breeding ground for pyroCbs marvels of fire physics.
As the air rises, it cools and expands.
Water then condenses on the smoke particles, and the cloud forms.
So you could see how that goes.
The smoke from a pyroCb travels well beyond the blaze that spawned it.
And they can get transported across hemispheres, basically.
The black carbon from a pyroCb cloud isnt exactly behaving itself up there, either.
That increases light absorption and raises temperatures in the atmosphere.
Why this happens in pyroCb clouds, though, scientists still dont fully understand.
(Organics in this case come from the fires combustion of vegetation.)
The monster blazes in Canada this summerhave been breeding them, too.
They seem to be happening more frequently, Beeler said.
Whether thats a function of warming climate and better identification, I think its probably both.
But the impacts seem to be very long-lasting and long-ranging.
This article originally appeared inGristathttps://grist.org/science/california-park-fire-spawning-smoke-thunderclouds-pyrocumulonimbus/.
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