“I have never heard of lightning causing new fires so far in advance of the main fire,” said Cordy Tymstra, the wildfire science coordinator for the Alberta government.Īs a warming world causes larger, more frequent, and more intense wildfires, fire-driven thunderstorm events are on the rise in places - including Texas, Portugal, South Africa, and Argentina - where they have never occurred before. A pyroCb formed over the fire that day, and lightning from the firestorm ignited several new fires in the forest 22 miles northeast of the fire’s front, astonishing wildfire experts. Yet another major pyroCb event occurred in May 2016 during a massive wildfire in Alberta that forced the evacuation of 88,000 people in the tar sands community of Fort McMurray. On that night in February, three clearly distinct pyrocumulonimbus storms erupted across the state of Victoria in southeastern Australia.
Later, Fromm and David Peterson, a colleague at the Naval Research Laboratory, labeled that day’s cluster of pyrocumulonimbus clouds “the mother of all pyroCbs,” surpassing even the events of Black Saturday in Australia in 2009 when monstrous bushfires killed 173 people, injured 414 others, and burned 1,700 square miles. A pyrocumulonimbus cloud, capping at 25,000 feet over the Mazatzal Wilderness during the Willow Fire near Payson, Arizona in 2014.
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