Researchers discover how wildfires create their own weather

Scientists working close to the line of wildfires are obtaining a new understanding of the fires' smoke plumes. The results are providing real-time information, such as vertical wind profiles, to firefighters battling blazes.

Doppler LiDAR is measuring winds near the plume of the King Fire in California in September, 2014. Image Credit: San Jose State University/NSF

Craig Clements, a meteorologist at San José State University (SJSU), and researcher Neil Lareau, also of SJSU, have discovered that wildfires can create their own weather, leading to extreme fire behavior.

The SJSU researchers mounted Doppler LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging, a remote-sensing method that uses light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure distances) instruments onto a pickup truck, which they placed near wildfires.

In addition to conducting research at active wildfires in the western U.S., the scientists performed controlled field experiments, setting fires and monitoring their rapid spread through an array of atmospheric instrumentation.

These studies gave the researchers information on how wildfires create their own weather systems. Those weather systems, in turn, fuel extreme fire behavior.

The results revealed vigorous, fire-generated updrafts and strongly turbulent eddies that formed along the fire plume's edges. The data also showed that fire-modified winds extended more than one mile from the fire itself.

The findings confirm longstanding, but previously unvalidated, predictions for how plumes rise from fires, and offer new insights into the processes that control how high and how far wildfire smoke will spread.

In addition to the El Portal Fire of July, 2014, in Yosemite National Park, California, the team has studied 22 other large wildfires in the western U.S.

"We're seeing a large number of fires," says Clements. "Many are extreme in terms of intensity. Higher-intensity fires cause deeper plumes, which can help spread fires by lofting embers and causing spot fires. (National Science Foundation)

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