“If and when the plume drifts over populated areas, it may turn day into night. There’s that much aerosol in the air.” Mike Fromm of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
Over a hundred wildfires are active in the heavily forested Canadian province of British Columbia. The fires have spread to the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut provinces after a cold front pushed through the region with powerful winds according to NASA. The fires have been caused by the abrupt warming of the planet from climate change. The endless conifer forests have been stressed from mountain pine beetles who thrive in a warming world when the winters are mild and their larva are not killed from the cold. This beetle is an epidemic. The infestation has brought down more than 16 million hectares of B.C. forest, and has begun destroying huge swaths of Alberta's boreal habitat. The stress on trees from drought and heat also are tied to global warming.
Fires near Lake Athabasca, captured by the Aqua satellite on August 14, 2017, shows smoke streaming north. That smoke joined with another smoke band from fires in British Columbia. The fires in BC were so intense that they produced several pryocumulus clouds, lofting smoke up to 13 kilometers (8 miles) into the atmosphere.Another satellite image, this time from the Aqua satellite, shows smoke billowing north from areas near Lake Athabasca. The fires in British Columbia were intense enough to produce numerous pyrocumulus clouds, which are essentially firestorms that tower into the sky, resembling thunderstorms.
Such clouds can vault smoke high into the atmosphere, all the way to the stratosphere, where it can linger for days or longer.
The Canadian fires are important for several reasons. First, they signal the transition to a more combustible future in the Far North, as climate change makes conditions more conducive to large wildfires.
Second, they are ideally located to directly feed smoke toward vulnerable Arctic sea ice and the Greenland Ice Sheet. In addition to altering the heat balance of the atmosphere, the smoke can deposit dark soot particles on the ice, which hastens melting by lowering the reflectivity of the ice and causing it to absorb more incoming sunlight.
Studies have tied the increasing number of large fires in parts of Canada and the U.S. to global warming. In fact, the level of fire activity across the boreal forests, which stretch from Alaska to Canada and around the top of the world to Scandinavia and Russia, is unprecedented in the past 10,000 years, according to a study published in 2013.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) on Suomi NPP recorded aerosol index (AI) values as high as 49.7 on August 15, 2017—more than 15 points higher than the previous record set in 2006 by fires in Australia. Maximum AI values also broke records on August 14 (49.4) and August 13 (39.9). Aerosols are solid or liquid particles (such as smoke, sea spray, and volcanic ash) that can prevent light from passing through the atmosphere. The satellite aerosol index was first reported in 1978 via measurements from Nimbus-7.Vice news video from 2015. The Prime Minister at that time was Stephen Harper. David Suzuki is not referring to Justin Trudeau. h/t BMScott
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