A forest fire in British Columbia, Canada, in June 2023
Image/Alamy Stock Photo
2023 broke the record of the hottest year, but could have a hottest leg. The entire northern hemisphere would have been almost 1 ° C warmer on average that revolved its summer without the cooling effect of the smoke of massive forest fires in Canada, it suggests a climate model. Smoke may also have taken the driest of registered India.
“I think it is really difficult to understand how giants were the fires. It was crazy,” says Iulian-Alin Rosu of the Technical University of Crete in Greece, who presented his findings at a meeting of the European Union of Geosciences in Vienna, Austria.
The emissions were about five or six times higher than that duration of any season of forest fires registered in Canada, Rosu estimates. The carbon dioxide of these fires is having a continuous heating effect, but in 2023 this heating was overcome by the cooling effect of sunlight that blocks smoke.
To estimate how much cooling the smoke causes, Rosu and his colleagues directed a series of simulations of climatic models with and without the Canadian emissions of forest fires. The results suggest that between May and September, the smoke caused the local cooling of so many ax 5.4 ° C (9.7 ° F) in small parts of Canada, and that the northern hemisphere as a whole was 0.9 ° C (1.6 ° F) cooler.
This may seem surprising since parts of Canada saw record temperatures. But the heat records were mainly in western regions, says Rosu, Waseas the smoke blew east and had the greatest cooling effect on that side of the country.
The impacts are limited to Canada. In the model, forest fire emissions led to changes in the winds on Asia that weave the monsoon and led less rain in India, and that is what really happened.
“The precipitation anomaly that is seen in the data is very, very close to what we see in our model,” says Rosu. That is an indication that the model did a very good job, he says.
However, the cooling effect did not last long. “When I looked at the November and December data, there really was no effect,” says Rosu.
The record established in 2023 for the most popular year did not last long, 2024 turned out to be hotter.
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