Description
Pyrocumulonimbus clouds (PyroCbs) are intense fire‑driven storms associated with extreme wildfire behavior that threatens communities and complicates suppression efforts. These events can inject massive smoke plumes into the stratosphere, where they spread globally, persist for more than a year, disrupt stratospheric circulation, influence the Antarctic ozone hole, and alter Earth’s radiative balance. Despite the significant impacts of these wildfire events, they are still understudied. Current research methods on PyroCbs are unable to distinguish deep pyroconvection from ordinary plume rise.
This approach uses geostationary satellites to directly observe PyroCb plume‑top structure and dynamics at high cadence. Our stereo algorithm retrieves plume height with an accuracy of ~300 m and wind‑speed retrievals with ~0.5 m/s accuracy. Continuous sub-hourly imaging enables detailed tracking of plume‑top heights, plume evolution, and convective dynamics. By analyzing stereo retrievals during North American wildfires from 2019–2025, this study will extract plume‑height and wind flow fields, examine aerosol transport within convective columns, and validate key cases with coincident satellite-based atmospheric lidar. The resulting stereo dataset and analysis will provide new constraints on boundary-layer–to-upper-troposphere/stratosphere coupling during PyroCbs and support improved representation of extreme fire convection in forecasting models, advancing earlier and more accurate warnings of hazardous fire behavior.