Can smoke from fires intensify tornadoes? Study finds smoke from Central America intensified 2011 tornadoes
“Yes,” say University of Iowa researchers, who examined the effects of smoke–resulting from spring agricultural land-clearing fires in Central America–transported across the Gulf of Mexico and encountering tornado conditions already in process in the United States.
The UI study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, examined the smoke impacts on a historic severe weather outbreak that occurred during the afternoon and evening of April 27, 2011. The weather event produced 122 tornadoes, resulted in 313 deaths across the southeastern United States, and is considered the most severe event of its kind since 1950.
The outbreak was caused mainly by environmental conditions leading to a large potential for tornado formation and conducive to supercells, a type of thunderstorm. However, smoke particles intensified these conditions, according to co-lead authors Gregory Carmichael, professor of chemical and biochemical engineering, and Pablo Saide, Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research (CGRER) postdoctoral fellow.
They say the smoke lowered the base of the clouds and increased wind shear, defined as wind speed variations with respect to altitude. Together, those two conditions increased the likelihood of more severe tornadoes. The effects of smoke on these conditions had not been previously described, and the study found a novel mechanism to explain these interactions.
“These results are of great importance, as it is the first study to show smoke influence on tornado severity in a real case scenario. Also, severe weather prediction centers do not include atmospheric particles and their effects in their models, and we show that they should at least consider it,” says Carmichael.
“We show the smoke influence for one tornado outbreak, so in the future we will analyze smoke effects for other outbreaks on the record to see if similar impacts are found and under which conditions they occur,” says Saide. “We also plan to work along with model developers and institutions in charge of forecasting to move forward in the implementation, testing and incorporation of these effects on operational weather prediction models.”
In order to make their findings, the researchers ran computer simulations based upon data recorded during the 2011 event. One type of simulation included smoke and its effect on solar radiation and clouds, while the other omitted smoke. In fact, the simulation including the smoke resulted in a lowered cloud base and greater wind shear.
Future studies will focus on gaining a better understanding of the impacts of smoke on near-storm environments and tornado occurrence, intensity, and longevity, adds Carmichael, who also serves as director of the Iowa Informatics Initiative and co-director of CGRER.
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Paper co-authors are Scott Spak ofthe UI Departments of Urban and Regional Planning and Civil and Environmental Engineering; Bradley Pierce and Andrew Heidinger of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Satellite and Information Service Center for Satellite Applications and Research; Jason Otkin and Todd Schaack of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Arlindo da Silva of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; and Meloë Kacenelenbogen and Jens Redemann of NASA.
The paper “Central American biomass burning smoke can increase tornado severity in the U.S.” can be found at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL062826/abstract?campaign=wolacceptedarticle.
The research was funded by grants from NASA, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Institutes of Health, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Fulbright-CONICYT scholarship program in Chile.
Come on. Haven’t you guys ever lit up and caused an F5?
Lit up what, exactly?
According to your comment’s date-stamp it took you three minutes to pose that question. A delay of that duration indicates that you know intimately what he was alluding to.
Dave’s not here.
The barbecue. (That wasn’t self-evident?)
D-A-V-E ???
Be careful not to exhale simultaneously.
One of these should do it:
http://www.sickchirpse.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Biggest-Joint-Ever-.jpg
B-I-G Bambu
The abstract not only mentions intensity.
OMG! Give anyone within reach a computer, two or more data sets and enough time, they will inevitably find co-relation. A quick wave of the hands and “Presto!”, it becomes causation. What’s not to like when you are shopping for funding?
Everyone who ate carrots in 1908 is dead today. Don’t eat carrots, they will kill you.
+10
And their good for your eyes, you ever seen a rabbit with glasses
Okay. It’s plausible. But what is the MAGNITUDE of the effect? Important, trivial, negligible? The press release is silent. And did they find any real-world evidence to shore up the theory, like measured parameters of cloud bases, tops, liquid water contents, etc.? If not, it’s just children playing in a virtual sandbox. Reporting on model results without any real-world evidence should be frowned upon. Instead they will probably get funding to continue playing in their sandbox.
Looks like it’s models all the way up.
And down. And around. And spinning fast.
You can read more about the extremely active severe weather during April/may 2011 at the link below.
It includes the outbreak on April 27th that was supposedly worsened by smoke from Central America.
Referring to that day:
“The second wave developed as moisture surged out of the Gulf of Mexico, maximum daytime
heating occurred, a cold front advanced eastward wind shear veered at different levels of the
atmosphere and a very active jet stream was enhanced by an upper level disturbance all of
which led to the atmosphere becoming extremely unstable and conducive for severe weather. The atmospheric conditions spawned numerous supercell thunderstorms and produced long lived violent tornadoes, many of which devastated the northern two thirds of central Alabama.
In advance of the event, the SPC issued a rare High Risk warning area for the second consecutive day in
parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia”
http://www.aon.com/attachments/reinsurance/201106_us_april_may_severe_weather_outbreaks_recap.pdf
There was an upper level trough approaching and with an upper level jet stream on the order of 150 miles/hour from the southwest that day(with dry air aloft) and a strong low level jet from the south feeding in surface dew points above 70 degrees(from the Gulf of Mexico) and winds veering with height ahead of a powerful cold front, that featured a wave of low pressure riding along it that day.
We had every element for violent tornadoes present to the max. Probably a big mesocyclone rotating from the base of the clouds to the mid levels too.
I don’t see how smoke particles from Central America could have been a factor here. How much could this factor have lowered the base of the clouds and even if the cloud base was slightly lower, so what?
Wind direction and strength would have likely been the same at the base of the clouds whether they were a slightly higher or lower, so wind sheer would not have changed.
Smoke from Central America being present was just coincidental. I couldn’t read the paper, just the abstract.
I’m sure their computer simulation accounted for all natural variability – we can be sure it was the smoke.
Plausible, maybe. I’m assuming they would be serious about tornado modeling in Iowa. The simulation needed to model a tornado is a different class of model than GCM’s. I assume a lot of data has been collected making the initial conditions less of an issue. Smoke particles could act to increase ice nucleation. What would that would do the tornado? I don’t know. They suggest further study is needed, you can hardly blame a researcher for that. They may have found a correlation that is validated by their model. I don’t know enough to reject this out of hand.
Find me a study that suggests no further studies are needed 🙂 Maybe if they were retiring…
For half a century we have been told that smoking is a health hazard.
Here’s the proof.
I think this group of authors were simply trying to see what outlandish connections they could make in a scientific paper and see who would take the bait and publish it. In the process, could they get additional grant money to help the mechanical engineer lead author fund his studies or the chemical and bioengineering professor to fund his department. Slap the right words on the title and sprinkle in the text and Viola!!! – free money.
Eight authors studying one, count’em ONE, tornado outbreak and a hypothetical accelerant from smoke from Yucatan.
Gee, was that the only source of soot in the atmosphere all decade? Western states forest fires have little or negative effect on tornado outbreaks?
Willis’s rule of thumb hypothesis about the importance of the paper is correlated with inverse square of the number of authors gets another data point of confirmation.
Smoke…and mirrors.
Why do I have this sneaking suspicion that they decided what they wanted to find, then went inside and teased the computer with a cattle prod until it came up with the answer they were looking for?
Was it the smoke from Central America? Or was it smokes from Mexico? I have another sneaking suspicion that a follow-up paper will report on the effect of hashish brownies on sensations of spinning counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere.
I see lawsuits ahead now, for anyone who burns something around the time a tornado forms…no more campfires or fireplaces….wood stoves, etc.
This whole Climate Change and the thousands (literally) of models, papers, studies, etc, etc are becoming nauseating, if any of these researchers could ever come out with a viable result they have now undermined their own outlook to the point nobody pays any attention or they are ridiculed and in a way that is a sad, sad description of our society. Is there a way out of this mess? Anyone? Can’t we get to some consensus on this? Can’t anyone say they were wrong and try to fix this? or am I being just naive?
Follow the money. (The Big Government institutions are going to pay (beforehand) ONLY for “research” that promises to create the results that Big Government needs. Or wants. Big Government bureaucrats are going to authorize their underliars (er, under-liens) to follow up research time and only apply for grants that will be successful – ei, create bigger budgewts and more funded research.)
Follow the power. (This enables the Obama White House and its minions to continue their CAGW power and control.)
Follow the paper. (Publish or perish. If a Big Government “researcher” or “scientist” has NOT proposed and edited and published papers that will GET APPROVED by the editors and his anonymous peer-reviewed Star Panel, she dies. )
Yes I did and followed “the money” and that is what made me comment the way I did. Orwell did write and predicted all of this as did many others, we should be learning, history repeating itself, as I said nauseating.
I don’t suppose they used water to put the fire out .( sarcasm off ) How much water evaporated and mixed with the smoke and soot ? And was salt water used ?
I can see how adding particulates to a nascent thunderstorm would affect it’s development. For a start, more particulates mean more phase change of water vapour into liquid droplets – I can see how that could accelerate the growing of a pressure difference. It seems plausible.
Look, one storm is not going to be conclusive or even quantify the effect.
But this does seem like an interesting first step.
Give they guys a break.
Anyone who has ever flown over Mexico would know that fires are constantly burning. Every where you go around the country side there is the palor of smoke hanging in the air. Every single day, unless there is a strong wind, the smoke from fires is present.
This has nothing, NOTHING, to do with agricultural. It is the burning of their trash heaps, which you can see behind every single shanty and house you travel past.
This is like saying growing apples causes earthquakes.
I can see where its certainly possible for smoke to intensify a thunderstorm. Modeling this scenario would require true knowledge of cloud mechanisms and its been said repeatedly in these forums that cloud mechanisms cannot be simulated in climate models. If clouds cannot be modeled, how did they do it in this study and why can’t they do it in GCM’s. You would have to make more assumptions than my mother-in-law.
The two largest tornado outbreaks were in 1974 and 2011. One during the global cooling scare and the other during the global warming scare. The one thing that both 1974 and 2011 have in common were strong La Nina’s. Data also shows that the number of violent tornadoes trended downward after the mid 1970s, the end of the natural cooling period.
I have attended the National Weather Service’s Skywarn class multiple times for storm spotting and weather nets on ham radio. It teaches that there are three things needed for severe weather to form. Cold air aloft, warm moist air below and wind shear.
To this layman it is obvious that cold is the key to severe weather. Those strong La Nina’s kept cold fronts stronger (cooler) as they moved across the US to collide with warm moist tropical air. Once we entered the warming half of the natural cycle the temperature difference wasn’t as great, violent tornadoes trended down.
I just don’t see how they can link smoke to tornado strength unless they can collect data from 1974 as a comparison.
Here in Oklahoma, the heart of tornado alley, 2014 was a bad year for grass fires. Lots of homes destroyed. Nearly every day during spring you could smell the soot from the fires. 2014 was also notable for record low number of tornadoes in the state.
Ranchers now make a common practice of burning pastures in late Winter/early Spring. They’ve let the fires get away from them at times and have caused real damage. An incident a few years ago in my native Osage County prairies was the subject of much mirth, as local people joked about certain ranchers who’d burned more than they should have and then whined to the Feds to get disaster relief for loss of grazing pastures, when apart from a few dead steers trapped at a few burned fence sections, the fire- renewed pastures were the goal, anyway.
Last year’s low soil moisture levels didn’t help matters, nor did arsonous firebugs, but I think fewer homes were burned down last year than in some previous years.
Texas really had a problem with burned homes, not only because of even worse drought conditions than here in OK, but because of so much building encroachment into areas with accumulated natural tinder, resulting in greater fire loss, as has been typical in Western fires of recent years.
If last years grass fires had anything to do with our low number of tornadoes, then burn (carefully,) baby burn.
We should start a petition to ban environmental assault matches!
(Or least limit the number of matches in a box to 10.)
John Isaacs once suggested that driving on the right side of the road increases tornado numbers and intensity–I think that suggestion went exactly nowhere, but he had observations on his side since they drive on the left in England, and England has fewer tornadoes than do we.
Smoke particles are hydrphobic, and maybe they suppress cloud formation and storminess (reduce tornado number and intensity) or maybe by suppressing cloudiness they allow the atmosphere to become more unstable (thus increasing tornado number and intensity). Playing science by just modeling and making more hypotheses gets one exactly nowhere. Please, make some testable predictions, and allow a credible experimental test.