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Global Risk Perception
Published in Debleena Bhattacharya, V K Singh, Climate Changes and Epidemiological Hotspots, 2022
Debleena Bhattacharya, V K Singh
The impact of the Australian forest fire was seen by the formation of pyro-cumulonimbus (pyroCb) clouds that caused stratospheric perturbations, which has associated larger magnitude than the previous benchmarks of maximum pyroCb activity and had approached the impact of moderate volcanic eruption (Khaykin et al., 2018; Peterson et al., 2018). The volcanic eruptions inject the ash and sulphur which is further oxidised and condenses to form sub-micron-sized aerosol droplets into the stratospheric levels. With the PyroCb, intense fire-driven convection lifts combustion merchandise in volatilised type furthermore as stuff together with organic and black carbon, smoke aerosols and condensed water. The star heating of the extremely assimilatory black carbon propels the smoke-laden air parcels upwards (Khaykin et al., 2018), which, combined with horizontal transport (Bourassa et al., 2019; Kloss et al., 2019), results in a lot of economical meridional dispersion of those aerosols and prolongs their stratospheric residence time (Yu et al., 2019).
Introduction to Invited Papers on Climate Change
Published in Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association, 2021
S. Trivikrama Rao, Ph.D.There is scientific consensus that climate change has been contributing to rising surface temperatures, changing weather pattens, and extreme weather events leading to extreme flooding in some regions and persistent drought in other regions. Wildfires have been increasing due to the heat and extremely dry conditions in the Western United States; these ravaging wildfires have even created pyro-cumulonimbus clouds, extending all the way to the top of the troposphere. The mega fires in the Western United States, Arctic Region, and Australia have devastated property and cost lives, creating extremely hazardous air quality conditions. Climate change might also be increasing not only the number of severe storms but also their intensity. Many research papers have presented evidence for very intense rainfall within a short time period. The recent horrendous flooding in the southern United States, Germany, Belgium, Bangladesh, China, and India are examples of what might be more and more common under changing climate. That anthropogenic activity has been playing a major role in climate change is no longer debatable.
Wildfire and prescribed burning impacts on air quality in the United States
Published in Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association, 2020
Daniel A. Jaffe, Susan M. O’Neill, Narasimhan K. Larkin, Amara L. Holder, David L. Peterson, Jessica E. Halofsky, Ana G. Rappold
A special case where emissions are transported very high into the atmosphere is when large buoyant plumes develop cumulus clouds, releasing latent heat and further enhancing vertical transport. These pyrocumulus (pyroCu) clouds can, in rare cases, develop into thunderstorms, known as pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb). PyroCb activity and buoyant plumes can inject gases and aerosols into the upper troposphere or lower stratosphere, where they can persist for weeks and months; these emissions can then be transported on a hemispheric scale (Fromm and Servranckx 2003; Fromm et al. 2006; Peterson et al. 2017; Sofiev, Ermakova, and Vankevich 2012). The exact mechanisms of pyroCb formation are still an active area of debate (Peterson et al. 2017) and research (Lareau and Clements 2016). Although pyroCb are a special subset of smoke plumes, the scope and scale of their emissions and the height of injection have been likened to that of a volcano, and a single event can reduce surface temperatures on a hemispheric scale. Fromm et al. (2010) suggest that some stratospheric aerosol layers previously assumed to be from volcanic eruptions were, in fact, due to pyroCb events.
What’s next for Australia’s water management?
Published in Australasian Journal of Water Resources, 2019
Katherine A. Daniell, Trevor M. Daniell
The unfortunate recent bushfires across Australia are another signal to remind us that, yes, we should be more proactive with our water and risk management practices with our populations. We now have increasing evidence that patterns of fire weather in Australia are also changing, linked not only to typical soil moisture and fuel load indices, but the increased number of Pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) wildfires, examples of which were experienced in Canberra in 2003 and the Victorian Black Saturday bushfires in 2009 (Di Virgilio et al. 2019). The sheer strength of such fires and widespread nature of other bushfires create many real dilemmas for Australian firefighters and planners and managers of all varieties, including those responsible for water management. Reducing levels in water storages, dried up farm dams and emptied swimming pools are just as problematic for our ability to fight fires–since they can often be used for last-ditch attempts to save life and property by firefighting helicopters–as they are for all our other human and environmental uses. How we manage declining storages over multiple years thus may need to be rethought, before there are no longer options of reasonable choices available.