California Wild Fires - Will we feel the effect this winter?

[Frozen Lands]

Hi everyone?

Not posted for a while but this one made me think.

As the wild fires in California rage (affecting around 240,000 acres at time of writing) and the huge smoke plumes can be see spreading across into the Pacific (NASA have some pretty high resolution images of it), I was wondering if this might affect our winter this year.

I guess I am taking it from the point of view that large volcanic eruptions can give a colder winter due to increased "global dimming" and wondered if the these fires might cause a similar thing on a smaller scale?

Quite selfish I know to hope that we might get a boost for colder weather based on their mis-fortune, but a thought all the same.

By the way, this is not a "will it increase Global Warming/CO2 issue as it's obvously not going to help, but about our forthcoming winter and the effect this might have on it

Apologies if this is in the wrong area by the way

Edited October 23, 2007 by Frozen Lands

[BrickFielder]

Yes No and Maybe.

Smoke reflects light which is heat that never reaches the ground meaning albedo changes so that slightly cooler temepratures are likely. The size of the smoke cloud however is not big enough to have a significant affect.

All that burning will release large amounts of CO2 which will contribute to global warming.

It will not affect weather in the same way as volcanoes because the emissions tend to be slightly different and tend to reach a different altitude.

Perhaps the most significant affect will actually be the drying out of the soils which can affect the weather patterns across the US and so to a limited extent in our area. The true answer is that it will probably make very little difference.

[SteveB]

I wonder though if the unusually bad out break of wild fires in the Med this year had an effect on our unusually wet summer

[Bobby]

The fires will have some sort of cooling effect but very unlikely to be significant. May not even be a good thing for our winter because it could disturb synoptic patterns in such a way that gives us a mild weather. Either way, I'd imagine the effect to be negligible and not really worth considering when looking at possible weather this winter - much more useful things to look at are El Nino/La Nino, SST's, general global synoptic patterns etc.

[Stratos Ferric]

No impact whatsoever. Volcanoes throw huge amounts of gas and buoyant aerosols right into the stratosphere. These fires are trivial by comparison, won't last long, and send out mainly heavy particles only into the boundary layer.

[Roger J Smith]

It will have an impact, you'll have ten million Mexicans living in the UK by January. :lol:

[Guest Viking141]

I was wondering about this too. Latest reports today estimate fires cover an area the size of Greater London.

Edited October 24, 2007 by Viking141

[SalopWatcher]

http://www.sundiegolive.com/

Only thread i could fidn ont he matter...

Thats down town San Diago...

Smokey!!!

[Gray-Wolf]

It's nice to know that there aren't to many advocates of the 'butterflies wing beat' posting on this thread!

The Malaysian/Indonesia fires a couple of summers back, anyone any pointers how it's effects were felt globally?

The Burning of the Med. regions (planet wide) is a well publisised marker of global temp increase is it not? Maybe I'm just reading too much into the last 7 years.........

Edited October 24, 2007 by Gray-Wolf

[Essan]

The Malaysian/Indonesia fires a couple of summers back, anyone any pointers how it's effects were felt globally?

Globally, an increase in atmospheric CO2 . Regionally it was a significant contributor to the Asia Brown Cloud. Whether the burning of a tree in Asia changes the path of a hurricane in the caribbean is perhaps something worth looking into?

SteveB: the Med fires this summer were caused by our unusually wet summer ...... or, rather, that same synoptic patterns that caused out wet summer caused a hot dry summer in the eastern med. The fires themselves had no impact on our weather (although possibly the wether here did improve after the fires ... )