Meteorologists and ??? ??atmospheric scientists were flabbergasted by the recent record-obliterating heat in the Pacific Northwest and Canada. Some records broke by 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
"It's a staggering event," Jeff Weber, a research meteorologist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, told Mashable.
That profound heat, which smashed Canada's all-time temperature record and hit 121 degrees — 4 degrees warmerthan ever recorded in the desert city of Las Vegas — dried out vegetation and amplified wildfires in British Columbia. Satellites captured the stunning blowup of these fire storms, which produced towering clouds stoked by the fire's intense smoke and heat.
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They're called pyrocumulonimbus clouds and are powerful, thunderous storms. NASA calls them the "fire-breathing dragon of clouds."
"I've watched a lot of wildfire-associated pyroconvective events during the satellite era, and I think this might be the singularly most extreme I've ever seen," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, tweeted Wednesday evening. "This is a literal firestorm, producing *thousands* of lightning strikes and almost certainly countless new fires."
"Absolutely mind-blowing wildfire behavior in British Columbia," tweeted Dakota Smith, a satellite analyst at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere.
SEE ALSO: 3 big wildfire questions, answeredIn a warming world, earth scientists expect increasingly favorable conditions for wildfires. Warmer air parches shrubs, grasses, and even trees, allowing wildfires to spread rapidly and more vigorously. A hotter climate doesn't create heat waves, but it makes heat waves more severe, meaning more flammable vegetation.
Below, you can see the massive fire-driven clouds, which reach some five miles up into the atmosphere, blowing up on Wednesday evening.
The Western fire season is just getting started.
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