When you first think of wildfires, you probably don’t think there’s actually anything good that comes from them. However, according to a recent study carried led by researchers from the University of Wyoming, the biomass smoke that’s produced from the South African wildfires actually helps to bring down the temperatures on Earth. This helps to combat the damage caused by the greenhouse effect.





“If you change the particles, you are changing the composition of the cloud,” says Xiaohong Liu, a University of Wyoming professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science. “For our study, we found the smoke comes down and can mix within the clouds. The changed clouds are more reflective of sunlight. Brighter clouds counteract the greenhouse effect. It creates cooling.”

Zheng Lu is a University of Wyoming research associate and lead author of the paper. It was co-written by Xiaohong Liu and is entitled “Biomass Smoke from Southern Africa Can Significantly Enhance the Brightness of Stratocumulus over the Southeastern Atlantic Ocean.” Together the pair conducted high-resolution computational modeling of this smoke and how it was affecting the clouds. They used the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) – Wyoming Supercomputing Center to do this.

Others that also contributed to the paper included some from the University of Science and Technology of China, the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland-Baltimore County (UMBC), and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. This new study has revealed that smoke and clouds actually sit much closer to one another than previously assumed, making the clouds more reflective of light and as a result speeds up the cooling effect.





As part of the research Liu and colleagues calculated that the CO2 produced from human activities creates a greenhouse effect of 1.66 watts per square meter. Fire smoke produced during the first fire season creates around 7 watts per square meter over the southeast Atlantic. “Our group is the first to quantify this brightening effect,” says Liu. “This (smoke aerosols in clouds) reflects more solar radiation to space, which results in less solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface. This creates a cooling effect.”

The fire season runs from July through October in South Africa, each year emitting more and more harmful smoke and gas into the air. While a lot of these fires occur naturally, there are plenty others that are intentionally started by farmers as a way of clearing the farmland. The smoke from these fires is so bad it can be seen from space.

Results from the study showed that the aerosols emitted from these fires mixed in with the clouds and increased the overall brightness of them, bring down the temperature of the Earth significantly. Moving forward the team would like to improve global climate models to account for this interaction with aerosols.





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