Shiloh
Editor, Senior Moderator
Source: http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix/story.html?id=30c549b5-2996-479a-abdf-d159300d4d4e
Fires could go 'pyro'
NASA field campaign gives scientists up-close look at Sask. fires
Margaret Munro, Canwest News Service
Published: Friday, July 04, 2008
Scientists say wildfires in northern Saskatchewan could go "pyro" this weekend, sending ash, smoke and gases soaring more than 10 kilometres up into Earth's upper atmosphere.
It is one of the more spectacular ways nature regenerates the northern boreal forest -- and one with such far-ranging implications that NASA has two research planes and 120 scientists in Cold Lake, Alta., tracking the blazes.
"It's the same as having a volcano go off," said Canadian fire expert Brian Stocks of the "pyro-convection" that could occur as early as today.
A cool front moving in over the fires is setting up the kind of explosive conditions that can send smoke billowing into the stratosphere, which starts at about 10 kilometres.
Pyro-convection is also associated with "blow-out" fire conditions on the ground, fuelling the fires and speed they travel at, says Stocks. "Basically the fire accelerates the convection and the convection accelerates the fire."
He is sympathetic to the northern communities evacuated because of the fires, which have burned more than 4,000 square kilometres.
But the blazes are giving researchers an unprecedented close-up look at boreal fires, which are expected to grow more common as the climate changes.
"We've been lucky. The most active fires in Canada are right next door," says atmospheric chemist Daniel Jacob of Harvard University, a lead scientist on the three-week NASA field campaign being run out of a hangar at the Canadian military base in Cold Lake.
There are about 120 scientists from around the world at the command post, two planes based in Cold Lake and a third, a B-200 King Air, in Yellowknife.
This morning, dozens of the scientists at Cold Lake will scramble onto the P-3B aircraft and DC-8 jetliner, which have been converted into flying laboratories. Teams on the ground will keep them posted on fire behaviour and the best smoke plumes to sample.
"There are dozens of fires we had to choose from," said NASA's Jim Crawford, an atmospheric scientist managing the project.
Stocks, who spent more than 30 years studying fires with the Canadian Forest Service before setting up a private research firm, is helping select the largest fires with the potential to send emissions to high altitudes.
The flights are not for the faint of heart. "Daylight through the windows turned to cappuccino-coffee," one U.S. researcher reported after an "exciting" flight Wednesday. "Exiting the plume sent grandma's tin of homemade cookies into the air and all over the floor."
Crawford says the planes don't fly into "the core" of the rising fire plumes. "It's a little too turbulent and unsafe," he said in a telephone interview from Cold Lake.
They fly around the fires sampling clean air upwind and the polluted air downwind. Then they fly through the smoke at various altitudes, charting changes in concentration and the "chemical evolution" of the hydrocarbons and other compounds thrown off by the fires. The planes are also equipped with lasers that send light above and below the aircraft to probe the smoke.
page 2 of 4
The fire emissions are also tracked by satellite and by instruments carried into the atmosphere by balloons released from a network of ground stations across the country. It's part of the project called ARCTAS, short for Arctic Research of the Composition of the Troposphere from Aircraft and Satellites.
While this month's focus is on fires, earlier this year the planes were criss-crossing the north form Alaska to Greenland, sampling the pollution wafting in from Asia, Siberia, Europe and North America that contributes to Arctic haze. The $24-million, three-year mission is an international polar year project to better understand the effect fire and pollution have on the northern atmosphere and changing climate system.
They are also "ground-truthing" the satellite systems and climate models used to monitor and forecast atmospheric conditions, which entails gathering on-site data from the places represented in the models, and confirming whether the qualities the models predict are actually happening. "The real goal is to make them better at interpreting what happens when we leave," says Crawford.
While this week's focus is on Saskatchewan fires, the scientists are also chasing smoke from blazes in California and Siberia that is wafting over Canada. And the DC-8 is expected to head for the North Pole next week to pick up the smoke from the various fires now burning.
But the excitement was building this week over the possibility of witnessing pyro-convection as the cold front moves in over the Saskatchewan fires, the biggest of which is now burning near the Manitoba/Saskatchewan border south of Reindeer Lake.
"It could send emissions from the fires to very high altitudes, where they can have an important impact on climate," says Jacob, of the possibility for pyro-convection lifting smoke into atmosphere where it could linger for months.
END OPTIONAL TRIM
While the Americans are leading ARCTAS, there is some Canadian involvement. Stocks joined the NASA project after a Canadian plan to study boreal fires as part of the polar year was rejected. And atmospheric scientist David Tarasick, of Environment Canada, was recruited by the ARCTAS team to release monitoring instruments from ground stations.
"It's too bad there is not more of a Canadian component," says Stocks. "A huge number of scientific papers are going to come out of this work and the go-to people about the impact of Canadian boreal fire on the Arctic will be from the U.S."
BEGIN OPTIONAL END
Gordon Miller, director general of Natural Resources Canada northern forest centre in Edmonton, said the department is interested in wild land fires and the implications for climate change and the Arctic but has limited resources and manpower to work with. He said a few scientists are peripherally involved in ARCTAS.
Researcher Mike Flannigan, based at a federal research centre in Sault Ste Marie, Ont., has been given $20,000 to study how much forest is consumed by the fires studied by the ARCTAS team. His group will head out after the fires are out to assess the damage. It's a "modest" contribution, says Flannigan, but important since boreal forests in the Northern Hemisphere hold an estimated one-third of the carbon found on land. And when forests burn, the carbon heads into the atmosphere as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide....
? The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon) 2008
Fires could go 'pyro'
NASA field campaign gives scientists up-close look at Sask. fires
Margaret Munro, Canwest News Service
Published: Friday, July 04, 2008
Scientists say wildfires in northern Saskatchewan could go "pyro" this weekend, sending ash, smoke and gases soaring more than 10 kilometres up into Earth's upper atmosphere.
It is one of the more spectacular ways nature regenerates the northern boreal forest -- and one with such far-ranging implications that NASA has two research planes and 120 scientists in Cold Lake, Alta., tracking the blazes.
"It's the same as having a volcano go off," said Canadian fire expert Brian Stocks of the "pyro-convection" that could occur as early as today.
A cool front moving in over the fires is setting up the kind of explosive conditions that can send smoke billowing into the stratosphere, which starts at about 10 kilometres.
Pyro-convection is also associated with "blow-out" fire conditions on the ground, fuelling the fires and speed they travel at, says Stocks. "Basically the fire accelerates the convection and the convection accelerates the fire."
He is sympathetic to the northern communities evacuated because of the fires, which have burned more than 4,000 square kilometres.
But the blazes are giving researchers an unprecedented close-up look at boreal fires, which are expected to grow more common as the climate changes.
"We've been lucky. The most active fires in Canada are right next door," says atmospheric chemist Daniel Jacob of Harvard University, a lead scientist on the three-week NASA field campaign being run out of a hangar at the Canadian military base in Cold Lake.
There are about 120 scientists from around the world at the command post, two planes based in Cold Lake and a third, a B-200 King Air, in Yellowknife.
This morning, dozens of the scientists at Cold Lake will scramble onto the P-3B aircraft and DC-8 jetliner, which have been converted into flying laboratories. Teams on the ground will keep them posted on fire behaviour and the best smoke plumes to sample.
"There are dozens of fires we had to choose from," said NASA's Jim Crawford, an atmospheric scientist managing the project.
Stocks, who spent more than 30 years studying fires with the Canadian Forest Service before setting up a private research firm, is helping select the largest fires with the potential to send emissions to high altitudes.
The flights are not for the faint of heart. "Daylight through the windows turned to cappuccino-coffee," one U.S. researcher reported after an "exciting" flight Wednesday. "Exiting the plume sent grandma's tin of homemade cookies into the air and all over the floor."
Crawford says the planes don't fly into "the core" of the rising fire plumes. "It's a little too turbulent and unsafe," he said in a telephone interview from Cold Lake.
They fly around the fires sampling clean air upwind and the polluted air downwind. Then they fly through the smoke at various altitudes, charting changes in concentration and the "chemical evolution" of the hydrocarbons and other compounds thrown off by the fires. The planes are also equipped with lasers that send light above and below the aircraft to probe the smoke.
page 2 of 4
The fire emissions are also tracked by satellite and by instruments carried into the atmosphere by balloons released from a network of ground stations across the country. It's part of the project called ARCTAS, short for Arctic Research of the Composition of the Troposphere from Aircraft and Satellites.
While this month's focus is on fires, earlier this year the planes were criss-crossing the north form Alaska to Greenland, sampling the pollution wafting in from Asia, Siberia, Europe and North America that contributes to Arctic haze. The $24-million, three-year mission is an international polar year project to better understand the effect fire and pollution have on the northern atmosphere and changing climate system.
They are also "ground-truthing" the satellite systems and climate models used to monitor and forecast atmospheric conditions, which entails gathering on-site data from the places represented in the models, and confirming whether the qualities the models predict are actually happening. "The real goal is to make them better at interpreting what happens when we leave," says Crawford.
While this week's focus is on Saskatchewan fires, the scientists are also chasing smoke from blazes in California and Siberia that is wafting over Canada. And the DC-8 is expected to head for the North Pole next week to pick up the smoke from the various fires now burning.
But the excitement was building this week over the possibility of witnessing pyro-convection as the cold front moves in over the Saskatchewan fires, the biggest of which is now burning near the Manitoba/Saskatchewan border south of Reindeer Lake.
"It could send emissions from the fires to very high altitudes, where they can have an important impact on climate," says Jacob, of the possibility for pyro-convection lifting smoke into atmosphere where it could linger for months.
END OPTIONAL TRIM
While the Americans are leading ARCTAS, there is some Canadian involvement. Stocks joined the NASA project after a Canadian plan to study boreal fires as part of the polar year was rejected. And atmospheric scientist David Tarasick, of Environment Canada, was recruited by the ARCTAS team to release monitoring instruments from ground stations.
"It's too bad there is not more of a Canadian component," says Stocks. "A huge number of scientific papers are going to come out of this work and the go-to people about the impact of Canadian boreal fire on the Arctic will be from the U.S."
BEGIN OPTIONAL END
Gordon Miller, director general of Natural Resources Canada northern forest centre in Edmonton, said the department is interested in wild land fires and the implications for climate change and the Arctic but has limited resources and manpower to work with. He said a few scientists are peripherally involved in ARCTAS.
Researcher Mike Flannigan, based at a federal research centre in Sault Ste Marie, Ont., has been given $20,000 to study how much forest is consumed by the fires studied by the ARCTAS team. His group will head out after the fires are out to assess the damage. It's a "modest" contribution, says Flannigan, but important since boreal forests in the Northern Hemisphere hold an estimated one-third of the carbon found on land. And when forests burn, the carbon heads into the atmosphere as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide....
? The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon) 2008