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Super-outbreaks of fire thunderstorms could change Earth's climate, Australian and US experts warn

Super-outbreaks of fire thunderstorms could change Earth's climate, Australian and US experts warn

Super-outbreaks of fire thunderstorms could change Earth's climate, Australian and US experts warn
Jul 27, 2021 2 mins, 2 secs

Fire thunderstorms — which occur in pyrocumulonimbus clouds — not only create their own weather system but may also be powerful enough to actually change the climate, according to scientists from Australia and the United States. .

A "super-outbreak" of fire thunderstorms — also known as pyroCb events — during Australia's Black Summer fires of 2019-20 released the energy of about 2,000 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons, according to a study published recently in the journal Nature Climate and Atmospheric Science. .

Mr McRae and a team of researchers — including scientists from the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington — quantified the scale of the Black Summer pyroCb super-outbreak, concluding the fires injected as much smoke into the stratosphere as a moderately sized volcanic eruption.

"It does place [the Black Summer super-outbreak] in a very special niche in extreme weather and Earth phenomena," said Dr Mike Fromm, an atmospheric scientist from the Naval Research Laboratory. .

The scientists said smoke and ash from major volcanic eruptions have caused disturbances to the global climate in the past. .

Dr Fromm said the cooling impact of smoke and ash in the upper atmosphere also underpinned the "nuclear winter" theory.

Dr Fromm said that pyroCb events such as the Black Summer super-outbreak have now been used to calibrate the "nuclear winter" theory.

In doing so, the research has provoked an extraordinary new question about the potential impacts of climate change.

"Could a series of large pyroCb outbreaks rival the potential climate impacts expected following a nuclear war?" the team asked in its journal article. .

"But, with these events [such as the Black Summer super-outbreak], you have a scalable phenomenon.

He said climate change could drive an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme fire events that, in turn, could change the climate

"With so much aerosol being pushed higher up into the atmosphere, climate change models have to start taking that into account," Mr McRae said

"People will have to start finding ways to extrapolate … from what we've learned from the Black Summer [fires] and North America right now, to get a realistic interpretation of what will be happening in 2040, or 2060."

Dr Flannigan said pyroCb events this year had been behaving in ways he had not seen in more than 40 years of fire science. 

According to Professor Bowman, asking if any one event has been caused by climate change is asking the wrong question. 

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