Experts Compare Behavior Of Mosquito Fire In Northern California To Volcanic Eruptions
As the Mosquito Fire exploded in Northern California on Thursday — one of numerous blazes erupting amid a historic September heat wave — experts compared the extreme fire behavior and spread to a volcanic eruption or nuclear blast. The fire has sent massive columns of smoke high into the atmosphere.
The extreme heat has exacerbated conditions driving the flames. The fire is chewing through dense and drought-stressed forest and chaparral in the steep terrain in the Tahoe National Forest, and it is threatening the nearby towns of Foresthill, Georgetown and Volcanoville. Cal Fire reported that the fire ballooned to about 23,000 acres and made a run yesterday, pushing into Volcanoville and destroying structures but not the entire community. “It’s the most intense fire of the season in Northern California,” Craig Clements, a professor of meteorology and climate science at San José State University, said in an interview. “These really extreme temperatures caused extensive drying of the dead fuels.”
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Kate Forrest, a graduate research assistant at San José State’s Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center, described the fire as having strong, hot updrafts that penetrate into the atmosphere and condense into enormous clouds, also known as pyrocumulus clouds. In this case, the smoky plume reached so high — about 40,000 feet — that it formed a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, or pyroCb — a sure sign of extreme fire behavior.
Forrest, whose research focuses on the factors that lead to fire-generated tornadoes, said the Mosquito Fire had a rotating column that was confirmed visually and by radar. “The fact that it was still putting up a pyroCb after sunset was an indicator of how much heat this fire was putting out,” she said. “I was blown away.” The cause of the blaze, which began Tuesday, is under investigation.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/09/mosquito-fire-explodes-california-extreme-heat/
