Gotta love a fire that creates it's own weather. Some pretty amazing video coming from this area, not to mention exploding trees, Google Fort McMurray if you've been under a rock the last few days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieTQvIdG-Vo
Thoughts and prayers to my fellow Canucks.
A few pasted words below.
Firefighters started to realize the uniquely destructive nature of the Fort McMurray wildfire when they saw aspen poplar trees instantaneously and loudly explode into fire.
As veterans of Alberta’s wildfire wars will tell you, the aspen does not readily burn, not with its green leaves and thick twigs. But in the hottest of fires, gases are released in the combustion process so it’s possible for a tree to heat up, ignite and catch fire all at once, as if it had exploded.
“The last time we’ve seen anything like this was the Chisholm fire, which is the most intense fire that we have recorded in the fire record, not just for Alberta, but for Canada and for the world,” says University of Alberta wildfire specialist Mike Flannigan.
The 2001 wildfire that went through the central Alberta hamlet of Chisholm burned at 233,000 kilowatts per metre, Flannigan says. At the 2011 Slave Lake fire, the heat was 33,000 kilowatts per metre. For context, if a fire is burning at 10,000 kilowatts per metre, it’s generally deemed that aircraft water bombing is less — or no longer — effective.
The Beast is what regional fire chief Darby Allen calls the Fort McMurray fire, and it might well be that the Fort McMurray fire is burning as hot as Chisholm, an issue that Flannigan and his team will soon investigate. The two fires already share one other indicator of unprecedented intensity, with both fires producing pyro cumulonimbus clouds, thunder and lightning storms generated by the fire’s smoke column.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieTQvIdG-Vo
Thoughts and prayers to my fellow Canucks.
A few pasted words below.
Firefighters started to realize the uniquely destructive nature of the Fort McMurray wildfire when they saw aspen poplar trees instantaneously and loudly explode into fire.
As veterans of Alberta’s wildfire wars will tell you, the aspen does not readily burn, not with its green leaves and thick twigs. But in the hottest of fires, gases are released in the combustion process so it’s possible for a tree to heat up, ignite and catch fire all at once, as if it had exploded.
“The last time we’ve seen anything like this was the Chisholm fire, which is the most intense fire that we have recorded in the fire record, not just for Alberta, but for Canada and for the world,” says University of Alberta wildfire specialist Mike Flannigan.
The 2001 wildfire that went through the central Alberta hamlet of Chisholm burned at 233,000 kilowatts per metre, Flannigan says. At the 2011 Slave Lake fire, the heat was 33,000 kilowatts per metre. For context, if a fire is burning at 10,000 kilowatts per metre, it’s generally deemed that aircraft water bombing is less — or no longer — effective.
The Beast is what regional fire chief Darby Allen calls the Fort McMurray fire, and it might well be that the Fort McMurray fire is burning as hot as Chisholm, an issue that Flannigan and his team will soon investigate. The two fires already share one other indicator of unprecedented intensity, with both fires producing pyro cumulonimbus clouds, thunder and lightning storms generated by the fire’s smoke column.