OTTAWA, ONTARIO: Queen Elizabeth II vacationed there, as did her parents before her. Hollywood’s royalty were regular visitors, too. Marilyn Monroe filmed scenes for River of No Return there, and The Emperor Waltz brought Bing Crosby and Joan Fontaine to its golf courses and tennis courts. The mountains of Jasper, Alberta, have also stood in for peaks around the world in other movies.Above all, Jasper National Park represented Canada both to the world and for many Canadians for over a century.
Now, tens of thousands of acres of the park and its mountain town of Jasper are either burning in an inferno or have been reduced to rubble and ash. Parks Canada, the national agency, said that since two largescale wildfires, which sent up a wall of flame more than 300 feet high, were whisked into the community on ferocious winds earlier in the week, 358 of its 1,113 buildings have been destroyed.
Officials said Thursday the wildfires were so intense that they generated their own weather. “It’s a sad day here because Jasper is such a gorgeous place,” Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, said Thursday. The fire was worsened by a pyrocumulonimbus, or a fire-generated thunderstorm, according to Flannigan. “They’re by far the most intense fires in the world,” he said.
A pyrocumulonimbus is a huge, smoke-filled thunderstorm generated when the intense heat from wildfires combines with atmospheric conditions ripe for storm formation. Although these heat-generated storms don’t produce much rain, they can create other types of weather such as hail, strong winds, lightning and tornadoes. Tornado-like winds were reported near the Park fire, which is burning in California. These storms can also create smoke plumes that can surpass the cruising altitude of a commercial aircraft. In the 2019-20 Black Summer fire season in Australia, for example, 38 such storms, known as pyroCbs, were observed. They injected enough smoke into atmosphere that scientists likened it to a nuclear winter.
Wildfires that are exacerbated by these types of storms can become nearly impossible to put out. They’re also more hazardous for firefighters, creating more extreme wind conditions and darkening skies. Unlike the study of other extreme weather events such as heat waves and hurricanes, the study of these storms is relatively new in scientific circles. Because data only dates to 2013, it’s difficult to determine a trend, said David Peterson, a meteorologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, California.
Now, tens of thousands of acres of the park and its mountain town of Jasper are either burning in an inferno or have been reduced to rubble and ash. Parks Canada, the national agency, said that since two largescale wildfires, which sent up a wall of flame more than 300 feet high, were whisked into the community on ferocious winds earlier in the week, 358 of its 1,113 buildings have been destroyed.
Officials said Thursday the wildfires were so intense that they generated their own weather. “It’s a sad day here because Jasper is such a gorgeous place,” Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, said Thursday. The fire was worsened by a pyrocumulonimbus, or a fire-generated thunderstorm, according to Flannigan. “They’re by far the most intense fires in the world,” he said.
A pyrocumulonimbus is a huge, smoke-filled thunderstorm generated when the intense heat from wildfires combines with atmospheric conditions ripe for storm formation. Although these heat-generated storms don’t produce much rain, they can create other types of weather such as hail, strong winds, lightning and tornadoes. Tornado-like winds were reported near the Park fire, which is burning in California. These storms can also create smoke plumes that can surpass the cruising altitude of a commercial aircraft. In the 2019-20 Black Summer fire season in Australia, for example, 38 such storms, known as pyroCbs, were observed. They injected enough smoke into atmosphere that scientists likened it to a nuclear winter.
Wildfires that are exacerbated by these types of storms can become nearly impossible to put out. They’re also more hazardous for firefighters, creating more extreme wind conditions and darkening skies. Unlike the study of other extreme weather events such as heat waves and hurricanes, the study of these storms is relatively new in scientific circles. Because data only dates to 2013, it’s difficult to determine a trend, said David Peterson, a meteorologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, California.
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