What is a derecho, and why is it so destructive? about:reader?url=https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/science-an...

nationalgeographic.co.uk

What is a derecho, and why is it so

destructive?
Photograph by Dave Chapman, Alamy

11-14 minutes

In the right conditions, walls of wind made up of

several thunderstorms can blow across hundreds of
miles in just hours.

Published 13 Aug 2020, 10:08 BST

Cars fleeing a derecho on May 30, 2012. Primarily seen in the

central and eastern United States, these unusual storms create
walls of wind that streak for hundreds of miles at high speeds.

Derechos may not be as well known as hurricanes or tornadoes,

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but these rare storms can be just as powerful and destructive.

Primarily seen in late spring and summer in the central and eastern
United States, derechos produce walls of strong wind that streak
across the landscape, leaving hundreds of miles of damage in their
wake. On August 10, 2020, a derecho swept across the Midwest
from South Dakota to Ohio, travelling 770 miles in 14 hours and
knocking out power for more than a million people.

The term derecho—which means “straight ahead” in Spanish—was

coined in 1888 by Gustavus Hinrichs, a physics professor at the
University of Iowa who sought to distinguish these straight-moving
winds from the swirling gusts of a tornado. Though the term
disappeared from use shortly afterward, meteorologists at the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
resurrected it a hundred years later. It entered the public lexicon in
2012, when one of the most destructive derechos in history swept
across roughly 700 miles from Ohio to the mid-Atlantic coast, killing
22 people and causing serious damage in metropolitan areas,
including Chicago and Washington, D.C.

NOAA officially defines a derecho as “a widespread, long-lived

windstorm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers
or thunderstorms.” For a swath of storms to be classified as a
derecho, it must travel at least 240 miles and move at speeds of at
least 58 miles an hour, though the winds are often more powerful.
The August 2020 Midwest derecho had winds up to 112 miles an
hour.

How derechos form

Normal thunderstorms occur when warm air rises from the surface
of Earth into colder air in the upper atmosphere. This cools the air
to its dew point, the temperature at which water vapour condenses
into droplets, which causes clouds to form. The cooled air drops
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back to the surface, where it warms up again and starts the process
over, generating further convection and ultimately causing a
thunderstorm.

The steeple at College Church in Wheaton, Illinois, was toppled

during a derecho on Monday, August 10, 2020, which also left
several trees in the nearby park heavily damaged.

Photograph by Mark Welsh, Daily Herald/AP

A storm’s downdraft—when the cooled air drops back down to the

surface—is key to producing the powerful winds that create
derecho conditions. When the cool air hits the ground, it spreads
out in all directions, pushing warm air near the surface into a front
of gusty wind. Stretching from four to six miles across, downbursts
also suck more air into a storm, causing it to strengthen.

When a cluster of strong downburst winds in the center of a storm

races ahead of the rest of the storm, it creates what’s known as a
bow echo. This bowing of the storm front forces even more warm

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air into the atmosphere, intensifying the thunderstorm. When a bow

echo—or a series of bow echoes—moves across more than 250
miles with wind gusts of more than 58 miles an hour, it can officially
be classified as a derecho.

Where derechos occur

Derechos have been documented in other parts of the world,

including Eastern Europe and South Asia. In 2002, a derecho over
eastern Germany killed eight people and injured 39, hitting Berlin
the hardest.

But while derechos are a global phenomenon, they primarily occur

across the central and eastern United States, which see an
average of one to two of these storms per year, compared to more
than a thousand tornadoes that churn across the country each year.
These straight-ahead storms most commonly form in the late spring
and summer, when high pressure weather systems—whirling
masses of descending air—move north from the tropics into the
U.S. Some derechos, however, occur during cooler weather and
are most likely to form in the region stretching from Texas across
the Southeast.

In May 2009, a “Super Derecho” pushed gusts of wind up to 106

miles an hour from the plains of Kansas to eastern Kentucky.
Though many described it at the time as an inland hurricane, this
storm system was in fact a derecho with several small tornados
embedded within its winds.

Derecho damage

A derecho can be as destructive as a tornado, but it is destructive

in a decidedly different way. The strong, swirling winds of a tornado
will cause debris to fall every which way, while a derecho’s straight-

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line winds are similar to a regular thunderstorm—but stronger.

Downburst clusters of wind caused by derechos can range from

four to six miles long, containing smaller pockets of extreme wind
called microbursts and burst swaths. The latter are only about 150
to 450 feet long, but they are severe and concentrated like the
winds of a tornado and can exceed 100 miles an hour. After a
derecho, pockets of massive destruction can sit next to areas that
escape relatively unscathed.

Derechos can cause protracted power outages, such as the June

2012 storm that knocked out power for five million people from
Chicago to the mid-Atlantic. But these rapidly moving winds pose a
particular risk to anyone who happens to be outdoors, such as
campers and hikers. Derechos move quickly and offer little notice of
their arrival, giving people hours or minutes to seek safety.
Thunderstorms can also rapidly evolve into derechos, making it all
the more important to take storm warnings seriously.

Fire clouds and fire tornadoes: How wildfires spawn

extreme weather

As climate change stokes larger and more intense

wildfires, firestorms are likely to become more
common. Here’s why they occur and what makes
them so dangerous.

Published 28 Sept 2020, 09:31 BST

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A pyrocumulonimbus cloud rises up over the Orroral Valley bushfire

burning to the south of Canberra, Australia, on January 31, 2020.
When the heat from a fire rises into the atmosphere, it can create
its own weather systems—such as these powerful fire
thunderclouds—that fuel further blazes.

Photograph by Brook Mitchell, Getty Images

Weather and wildfires share a close relationship. Certain weather

conditions are known to ignite wildfires: High temperatures and low
humidity dry out the landscape, lightning strikes can spark a flame,
and fast-moving winds spread flames across nearby desiccated
land.

But wildfires also spawn their own weather systems, including

pyrocumulonimbus clouds—which NASA has called the “fire-
breathing dragon of clouds” for the thunderbolts they hurl at Earth,
fuelling further blazes and sometimes even fire tornadoes.

Fire weather has contributed to the scale of several historic

conflagrations, including the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires that
burned more than a million acres across Australia, and the wildfires
across the West Coast of the United States in 2020. Here’s what
causes firestorms—and why they’re becoming more common in a
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warming world.

How firestorms get started

Firestorms form through a convective process, in which heat rises

through the air. When a column of moist air over a fire becomes
intensely hot, it rushes up into the atmosphere where it cools and
condenses into droplets, creating fire clouds called pyrocumulus
clouds. Unlike the fluffy white cumulus clouds that also are created
by convection, fire clouds are grayish or brown because of the ash,
smoke, and particulate matter that get swept into the updraft. The
tops of these clouds can reach nearly six miles high.

Firefighters battle blazes from the Hog fire, which exploded across
more than 9,500 acres of land in Northern California, near
Susanville, on July 20, 2020. The fire was so intense it produced a
pyrocumulonimbus cloud and fire whirls.

Photograph by Josh Edelson, AFP/Getty Images

Firefighters look on as a thunderstorm cell draws in a smoke

column from the Hog fire on July 21, 2020. Alhough
pyrocumulonimbus clouds rarely produce precipitation, this one
eventually evolved into a hail storm that extinguished some of the
flames—and fanned others.

Photograph by Josh Edelson, AFP/Getty Images

As a fire grows, the updraft funnels smoke and particulates ever

higher into the lower stratosphere, forming even bigger
pyrocumulonimbus clouds. They look similar to regular
thunderclouds, but these clouds—also called pyroCbs—are far
more devastating. They remain tethered to the fire that spawned
them, spewing embers and lightning that continue to fuel the fire.
These clouds also tend to produce lightning with a positive rather
than negative charge, which makes the storm last longer, and they
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rarely form rain to help extinguish a wildfire.

Pyrocumulonimbus clouds also occasionally trigger fire tornadoes,

which form when the updraft twists and stretches the air that is
being sucked into the sky at high speeds. These fiery whirls tend to
last only a few minutes and reach no more than 150 feet tall. But
with wind speeds of up to 140 miles an hour, they can do serious
damage to anything in their path.

Firestorm damage

Fire weather helped fuel some of the more devastating wildfires in

recent history. In 2009, the Black Saturday bushfires in the
Australian state of Victoria generated clusters of pyroCb clouds that
stretched more than nine miles high and ignited new fires that
contributed to the overall spread across more than a million acres
of land. The Black Saturday fires killed 173 people, the greatest
loss of life from fire since Australia’s colonisation in 1788.

On August 8, 2019, NASA’s DC-8 flying laboratory got a rare look at

a pyrocumulonimbus cloud as it was rising from a fire in eastern
Washington State. Scientists are studying these fiery phenomena to
better understand their potential consequences in a warming world.

Photograph by Joshua Stevens, NASA Earth Observatory

In 2017, an even bigger wildfire in the forests of British Columbia

produced five fire thunderstorms nearly simultaneously. They blew
smoke up to 14 miles into the stratosphere as black carbon in the
smoke absorbed the sun’s energy and heated the plume, making it
rise faster and farther. Multiple studies have shown that the plumes
were comparable to those of a moderate volcanic eruption and
remained in the atmosphere for almost nine months.

In the United States, California has also seen several intense

pyrocumulonimbus events. During the Carr fire near Redding in
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July 2018, a fire tornado spinning at speeds of up to 143 miles an

hour was responsible for four of the eight deaths associated with
the fire. In August 2020, several possible fire tornadoes were
reported in Northern California during a record-breaking fire season
rife with firestorms.

Firestorms also contribute to the damaging effects that wildfires

have on human health. The gases and particles that make up
wildfire smoke have been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular
illnesses, and firestorms can exacerbate the blazes and increase
levels of smoke.

Fire weather and climate change

As climate change stokes bigger and more intense wildfires,

scientists believe the planet will experience a rise in firestorms. In
2019, Australia saw as many fire-generated storms as it had seen
in the 20 preceding years. On September 7, 2020, smoke from a
pyrocumulous cloud near Fresno, California, shot 10 miles into the
stratosphere, a record for a fire in North America that likely
released significant carbon emissions.

In fact, scientists believe these firestorms are responsible for “a

huge volume” of the pollutants in the upper atmosphere. But there’s
still much that’s unknown about how firestorms might contribute to
climate change, including whether their plumes damage the ozone
layer that protects Earth from ultraviolet radiation and whether they
might actually have a temporary cooling effect on the planet by
blocking sunlight—a phenomenon seen in volcanic eruptions.
Answering these questions will be key to understanding the true
consequences of firestorms in a warming world.

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