Smoke in the Stratosphere: What Wildfires have Taught Us About Nuclear Winter
Abstract
Forest fire experts have conjectured and nuclear winter investigators have theorized that extreme fire storms could inject smoke and other emissions into the lowermost stratosphere. Confirmation of this phenomenon has now been realized with the discovery of forest fire smoke in the stratosphere and the link between these smokes (and subsequently other biomass burning emissions) and extreme pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) storms. Since the discovery of stratospheric smoke in 1998, research into the pyroCb phenomenon has revealed that such occurrences are surprisingly frequent, they occur in both boreal and austral hemispheres, they cause hemispheric temperature perturbations, and they typically have impacted remote sensing data in unexpected ways that call for a new look at old archives. In this paper we will discuss the pyroCb discovery, its noteworthy eruptive manifestations, the impact on stratospheric aerosols, and correlation with stratospheric warming/tropospheric cooling. In addition we will revisit historical cases of aerosol layers in the stratosphere, originally ascribed to volcanoes, from a pyroCb perspective.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2006
- Bibcode:
- 2006AGUFM.U14A..04F
- Keywords:
-
- 0305 Aerosols and particles (0345;
- 4801;
- 4906);
- 0360 Radiation: transmission and scattering;
- 0370 Volcanic effects (8409);
- 1640 Remote sensing (1855);
- 3314 Convective processes