A flight tracker recently uncovered that a NASA aircraft was flying in B.C. earlier this week, and we wanted to figure out why.
Dr. David Peterson is the principal investigator for the NASA INSPYRE project, and we had a one-on-one to discuss the B.C. portion of the mission.
Expanding that INSPYRE moniker gets us “INjected Smoke and PYRocumulonimbus Experiment,” and the reason the NASA aircraft was in B.C. was due to the prevalence of wildfires in the province and the ability for these wildfires to generate weather.
According to the NASA website, INSPYRE is testing the hypothesis that increasing wildfire size and intensity amplifies pyroCb-driven smoke into the stratosphere, which induces measurable changes to Earth’s “radiative balance.”
We learned from Peterson that B.C. is playing quite the role in this mission.
“It turns out that British Columbia, Canada, is actually one of the hotspots, if you will. Some of the largest fire-generated storm events ever recorded have occurred there.”
NASA employed its ER-2 aircraft and the Gulfstream V (G-V) platforms to aid the mission. The ER-2 flew over the Pear Lake wildfire at around 60,000 feet.
The G-V (NASA)
The high-altitude ER-2 (NASA)
The ER-2 has no passengers, and the only person onboard is a pilot.
“It’s kind of like a steerable satellite, and it has instruments on board that can measure the fire at 50-meter resolution. So we can get a nice view of the fire every 15, 20 minutes if we just have passes continuing repeatedly over the fire.”
Peterson explained that it’s important to be able to characterize how the fire is spreading, what parts are getting hotter, what parts are getting cooler, and how it’s impacting plume growth, “which ultimately affects if we get a thunderstorm or not.”
He said that this is the first flight of its kind that has taken place in B.C. or Canada. It started a couple of weeks ago and will go through to the middle of September.
Peterson explained that the smoke from these fires can create fire-generated weather systems like thunderstorms and fire tornadoes, or what some call firenadoes. He said that severe weather generated by wildfires isn’t well understood.
“You can imagine that the fire itself is the sort of hot bubble. It creates the heating mechanism that works upward in the atmosphere. If that bubble continues to rise and encounters a layer of the atmosphere that has some moisture and instability, it can generate a cloud,” Peterson said.
Peterson said that when these conditions occur, air near the ground has to come in and fill the void left by the thunderstorm updraft that’s accelerating the movement of smoke through the clouds.
“You get this really erratic wind behavior near the fire, which can create hazards for the firefighting effort. We’ve seen fire-generated tornadoes in that scenario,” he said.
In 2015, New Zealand Geographic said that firenadoes may become more common as wildfires increase in frequency.
“Firefighters fear such physics: they know that smouldering embers, ash and gases sucked into the towering flame can be reignited, then scattered as far as five kilometres,” the publication wrote.
Major events in 2017 and 2020
NASA
“One of the watershed moments in this field occurred in 2017,” Peterson said, reflecting on a B.C. event.
There were four or five large fire events one evening in 2017, and a large amount of smoke was pushed into the atmosphere. Peterson said that they published a study comparing it to a volcano in terms of the size and scope of the smoke plume.
“It traveled around the globe, and the plume basically encircled a portion of the northern hemisphere and persisted for almost a year,” Peterson said.
“Less than three years after that came the Australian Black Summer.”
Peterson said that smoke persisted in the atmosphere for over a year and a half.
“Western Canada has been a place where a lot of these have occurred in the past, at least some of the bigger events, and it’s a place where you can get a lot a lot of large wildfires, and it’s far enough north where you get occasional weather disturbances that come through, and a lot of times the really big events occur just ahead of you’ve gone through a heat wave. Now a cold front is coming in, the atmosphere destabilizes, and then the fires explode,” Peterson said.
There’s still lots of work to be done to understand the complexities of these weather events fully, but that’s why the ER-2 and G-V were flying above B.C., and likely will again over the next month.