Since September last year, hundreds of fires have burned millions of hectares in Australia, leaving at least 28 people dead.
Scientists say that record-breaking hot and dry conditions are creating the perfect environment for the fires to spread. These kinds of conditions are likely to become more common in Australia as the world's climate changes, Stefan Rahmstorf, from Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, toldAccording to NASA, the heat and dryness has also led to the formation of"an unusually large number" of so-called pyrocumulonimbus events.
While the formation of pyrocumulonimbus clouds is relatively common, meteorologist Michael Fromm and colleagues from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory have detected more than 20 fire-induced storms in the last week of December 2019 and the first week of 2020.Fromm said in a statementPyrCbs can help the smoke to spread around the world, by enabling it reach the stratosphere, which begins at around 6.
"That said, preliminary evidence indicates that the current Australian event will probably fall within the top five of all the plumes ever documented in terms of height. And the overall volume of smoke injected into the stratosphere appears to be among the largest observed in recent decades." New Zealand—which lies more than 1,000 miles away from Australia's east coast—is being particularly badly affected by the fire smoke. The country has experienced poor air quality in some areas and visibly darkened snow has been spotted on mountaintops, according to NASA.
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