From our Friends at the National Weather Service in Medford, Oregon these incredible photos taken of the Gulch Fire near the California and Oregon border from an Oregon Air National Guard F-15 Eagle. The photos show the huge pyrocumulonimbus cloud (pyroCb) which is a type of cumulonimbus cloud that forms above a source of heat, such as a wildfire, and may sometimes even extinguish the fire that formed it. Pyrocumulonimbus is the fire-breathing dragon of clouds. A cumulonimbus without the pyre part is imposing enough -- a massive, anvil-shaped tower of power reaching five miles high, hurling thunderbolts, wind and rain. Add smoke and fire to the mix and you have pyrocumulonimbus, an explosive storm cloud actually created by the smoke and heat from fire, and which can ravage tens of thousands of acres. And in the process, pyroCb storms funnel their smoke like a chimney into Earths stratosphere, with lingering ill effects. It is the most extreme manifestation of a pyrocumulus cloud. According to the American Meteorological Society’s Glossary of Meteorology, a pyrocumulus is a cumulus cloud formed by a rising thermal from a fire, or enhanced by buoyant plume emissions from an industrial combustion process.Analogous to the meteorological distinction between cumulus and cumulonimbus, the pyrocumulonimbus is a fire-aided or –caused convective cloud, like a pyrocumulus, but with considerable vertical development. The pyroCb reaches the upper troposphere or even lower stratosphere and may involve precipitation (although usually light), hail, lightning, extreme low-level winds, and in some cases even tornadoes. The pyroCb was named following the discovery that extreme manifestations of this pyroconvection caused direct injection of large abundances of smoke into the lower stratosphere.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 22:31:35 +0000
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