Ukraine wildfires
Australia's bushfires set a record for the largest smoke cloud generated by a wildfire, a new paper reports. The plume was at least three times larger than any previously recorded one.

Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan's (USask) Institute of Space and Atmospheric Studies say that last winter's Australian wildfires created a smoke cloud that pushed all the way to the stratosphere, some 35 kilometers above the surface, and reached incredible sizes. At its largest, it measured 1,000 kilometers across. The cloud remained intact for three months and traveled over 66,000 kilometers.

King smoke
"When I saw the satellite measurement of the smoke plume at 35 kilometres, it was jaw dropping. I never would have expected that," said Adam Bourassa, professor of physics and engineering physics, who led the USask group which played a key role in analyzing NASA satellite data.
The fires seen in Australia this year were so devastating that the summer of 2020 has been nicknamed the "Black Summer". It's an apt name — the blazes claimed over 5.8 million hectares of forest in the continent's southeast and bellowed massive amounts of smoke.

An international research team led by Sergey Khaykin from Laboratoire Atmosphères, Milieux, Observations Spatiales (LATMOS) in France. The findings, they hope, will help us better understand how wildfires interact with and affect our planet's atmosphere.
"We're seeing records broken in terms of the impact on the atmosphere from these fires," said Bourassa. "Knowing that they're likely to strike more frequently and with more intensity due to climate change, we could end up with a pretty dramatically changed atmosphere."
Bourassa's team has experience in a specific type of satellite measurement that can pick up on smoke in the upper layers of the atmosphere. He explains that wildfires such as those in Australia and Western Canada (in 2017, the world's second-largest to date) got so big that they generated their own clouds, Pyrocumulonimbus, and their own thunderstorms.