Recent boreal and austral wildfire seasons have exhibited an apparent graduation toward new extremes in wildfire behavior, explosive pyroconvection, and hemisphere-scale smoke plumes. For instance, a wildfire complex in British Columbia, Canada, erupted into at least seven pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) storms during August 2017, generating a stratospheric smoke plume unprecedented in the satellite era (post 1978). High-altitude smoke from this event was observed over the Arctic, as well as most of Europe and northern Asia. Observations across the entire Northern Hemisphere revealed plume concentration, mass burden, and optical/physical properties unprecedented at stratospheric altitudes in the absence of a major volcanic eruption. In an apparent first for western Europe, fatality-causing wildfires in Portugal exploded into pyroCb during June and October 2017. In January 2018, the first pyroCb ever detected in South America exploded from a prescribed fire in Argentina. Our motive for this session is to discuss and assess the impacts of these and other extreme fire events on communities, weather, and climate. Contributions to this session can focus on the details of specific events or upper-atmospheric smoke plumes in general. Several important science questions will be addressed: the observational gaps exposed by these unprecedented events, the nature and expected frequency of the fuel/fire/plume dynamics leading to pyroCb plumes in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, the hemispheric atmospheric impact, and our modeling/predictive capability. We solicit papers on remote sensing (active and passive), in situ measurements, and modeling.
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