Evolution of a pyrocumulonimbus event associated with an extreme wildfire in Tasmania, Australia

Ndalila, Mercy N.; Williamson, Grant J.; Fox-Hughes, Paul; Sharples, Jason; Bowman, David M. J. S.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-20-1497-2020

Articles | Volume 20, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-20-1497-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-20-1497-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 20, issue 5

Research article

|

27 May 2020

Research article |

| 27 May 2020

Evolution of a pyrocumulonimbus event associated with an extreme wildfire in Tasmania, Australia

Mercy N. Ndalila, Grant J. Williamson, Paul Fox-Hughes, Jason Sharples, and David M. J. S. Bowman

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-20-1497-2020-supplement

Data sets

BARRA v1.0: the Bureau of Meteorology Atmospheric high-resolution Regional Reanalysis for Australia (http://www.bom.gov.au/research/projects/reanalysis/) C.-H. Su, N. Eizenberg, P. Steinle, D. Jakob, P. Fox-Hughes, C. J. White, S. Rennie, C. Franklin, I. Dharssi, and H. Zhu https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-2049-2019

Australian Operational Weather Radar Dataset J. Soderholm, A. Protat, and C. Jakob https://doi.org/10.25914/5cb686a8d9450

Global upper air soundings University of Wyoming http://weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/sounding.html

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Short summary

We analyse the evolution of a pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb), or fire-induced thunderstorm, during the Forcett–Dunalley fire on 4 January 2013 and relate it to the prevailing fire weather and fire severity patterns. We show that the pyroCb reached an altitude of 15 km, was associated with elevated fire weather, and formed over a severely burned area. Additionally, we show that eastern Tasmania is prone to elevated fire weather which has implications for fire weather forecasting and fire management.