The baking temperatures currently cooking in Canada are exacerbating the behavior of a truly hellish fire that has stunned meteorologists. With record temperatures in the Pacific Northwest, British Columbia is experiencing a growing number of wildfires. Record heat and extensive fires combine to form a kind of Cumulonimbus cloud that forms above the heat source, known as Camulonimbus flammagenitis. Instead, these storm clouds are pumping intense showers of lightning, which could probably exacerbate the flames.
In other words, it’s a vicious circle: fires are helping to create a kind of cloud that produces lightning, which probably spreads more fires and more. Baishala meteorologist Chris Vagasky tweeted that the North American Lightning Detection Network felt 710,177 lightning strikes in British Columbia and northwestern Alberta in just 15 hours between the afternoon of June 30 and the morning of July 1.
Of these electrifying events, 112,803 were cloud-to-ground lightning bolts, while 597,314 were in-cloud pulses, meaning strikes do not fall to the ground. Vagasky estimates that this is only 0.2 percent of the year, about 5 percent of Canada’s annual lightning. “I’ve seen a lot of pyroconventive phenomena related to fires in the age of satellites and I think it’s probably the most extreme I’ve ever been,” climate scientist Daniel Swain of the Institute of Environment and Sustainability tweeted at UCLA. “It’s a literal fire storm, producing thousands of * thunderbolts and almost certainly countless new fires.”
On Monday, June 20, Canada set a record temperature of 47.9 degrees Celsius (116 degrees Fahrenheit). Van days later, 90 percent of the city was burned to death. As of June 20, the British Columbia Wildfire Service has listed 78 active wildfires on the note. This piece of North America is usually associated with mild weather, so the freak weather comes as a shock to area residents and infrastructural shocks. Although the exact number of deaths is unclear, at least 486 sudden deaths were reported in five days during the unprecedented heatwave in British Columbia has been reported to increase.
Streetcar services were suspended for three days south of the Portland border in Oregon, after equipping temperature molten power lines and red overhead cables.
