Smoke-charged vortices in the stratosphere generated by wildfires and their behaviour in both hemispheres : comparing Australia 2020 to Canada 2017

TL;DR

This study compares smoke-charged vortices generated by major wildfires in Australia and Canada, analyzing their formation, behavior, and global transport in the stratosphere using satellite and reanalysis data.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of wildfire-induced vortices in the stratosphere across hemispheres, revealing their dynamics and long-range transport mechanisms.

Findings

Vortices can travel across the Atlantic and perform global journeys.

They are maintained by internal heating and data assimilation.

Wildfire smoke can reach up to 35 km in the stratosphere.

Abstract

The two most intense wildfires of the last decade that took place in Canada in 2017 and Australia in 2019-2020 were followed by large injections of smoke in the stratosphere due to pyroconvection. It was discovered by Khaykin et al. (2020, doi:10.1038/s43247-020-00022-5) and Kablick et al. (2020, doi:10.1029/2020GL088101) that, after the Australian event, part of this smoke self-organized as anticyclonic confined vortices that rose in the mid-latitude stratosphere up to 35 km. Based on CALIOP observations and the ERA5 reanalysis, this new study analyzes the Canadian case and find, similarly, that a large plume penetrated the stratosphere by 12 August 2017 and got trapped within a meso-scale anticyclonic structure which travelled across the Atlantic. It then broke into three offsprings that could be followed until mid-October performing three round the world journeys and rising up to 23 km. We analyze the dynamical structure of the vortices produced by these two wildfires and demonstrate how they are maintained by the assimilation of data from instruments measuring the signature of the vortices in the temperature and ozone field. We propose that these vortices can be seen as bubbles of low absolute potential vorticity and smoke carried vertically across the stratification from the troposphere inside the middle stratosphere by their internal heating, against the descending flux of the Brewer-Dobson circulation.