Smoke from hundreds of wildfires darkened skies over the Alaskan Interior this summer, with the state experiencing its fastest start to the fire season on record amid hot and dry conditions.
Last year, Siberian wildfires scorched some 65,000 square miles of Siberian forest, or an area nearly the size of Cambodia. While cloaking the region for months in acrid smoke, some of which reached the North Pole for the first time, those wildfires set a sobering new record for the share of carbon emissions from the world’s highest latitudes.
Fires in the Arctic and boreal regions “have really gone off in ways we haven’t seen in the observed satellite record” beginning in 2003, said scientist Brendan Rogers at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts. In June 2020, the Russian town of Verkhoyansk, located along the 67th parallel, registered a new Arctic temperature record of 38C , according to the World Meteorological Organization.
Lightning-ignited fires have more than doubled in Alaska and the Northwest Territories since 1975, according toAll three of these trends — more frequent extreme temperatures, slowing air circulation, and increasing lightning strikes — are expected to escalate in coming years, leading to an even more worrisome future where northern wildfires could challenge the world’s efforts to rein in climate-warming emissions.
“This is a source of greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere that can further contribute to climate warming that we hadn’t really been … counting on,” Natali said.While the rapid spike in Arctic wildfire activity is alarming for scientists, the global area that burns each year shrank by about 25% between the late 1990s and 2015, according to aAfrica is largely driving this downward trend.
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Australian wildfire smoke in the stratosphere: the decay phase in 2020/2021 and impact on ozone depletionAbstract. Record-breaking wildfires raged in southeastern Australia in late December 2019 and early January 2020. Rather strong pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) convection developed over the fire areas and lofted enormous amounts of biomass burning smoke into the tropopause region and caused the strongest wildfire-related stratospheric aerosol perturbation ever observed around the globe. We discuss the geometrical, optical, and microphysical properties of the stratospheric smoke layers and the decay of this major stratospheric perturbation. A multiwavelength polarization Raman lidar at Punta Arenas (53.2∘ S, 70.9∘ W), southern Chile, and an elastic backscatter Raman lidar at Río Grande (53.8∘ S, 67.7∘ W) in southern Argentina, were operated to monitor the major record-breaking event until the end of 2021. These lidar measurements can be regarded as representative for mid to high latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere. A unique dynamical feature, an anticyclonic, smoke-filled vortex with 1000 km horizontal width and 5 km vertical extent, which ascended by about 500 m d−1, was observed over the full last week of January 2020. The key results of the long-term study are as follows. The smoke layers extended, on average, from 9 to 24 km in height. The smoke partly ascended to more than 30 km height as a result of self-lofting processes. Clear signs of a smoke impact on the record-breaking ozone hole over Antarctica in September–November 2020 were found. A slow decay of the stratospheric perturbation detected by means of the 532 nm aerosol optical thickness (AOT) yielded an e-folding decay time of 19–20 months. The maximum smoke AOT was around 1.0 over Punta Arenas in January 2020 and thus 2 to 3 orders of magnitude above the stratospheric aerosol background of 0.005. After 2 months with strongly varying smoke conditions, the 532 nm AOT decreased to 0.03-0.06 from March–December 2020 and to 0.015–0.03 throughout 2021. The particle extinction coefficients at 532 nm were in the rang
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