Fire chaos in Canada: Leipzig laser illuminates forest fire clouds regional

Leipzig – Leipzig, Canada is about 6,000 kilometers from the wildfires in Quebec, Canada: but a new atmospheric laser technology is making smoke clouds visible even here.

A laser beam from the roof of the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) in Leipzig makes the smog particles glow because they are of biological origin. This allows them to be clearly distinguished from mineral sources such as volcanic particles or Saharan dust.

TROPOS Director Professor Dr. Andreas Mackay: “It’s interesting and scary at the same time what dimensions these wildfires have now reached. As forests burn for weeks in Canada and the United States, it’s not just the people there who are affected by the disaster.

Thin layers of smoke can also be detected between 3 and 12 kilometers above Leipzig. However, the environmental disaster in North America is not currently a health hazard in Europe – the smoke at high altitudes is very diluted.

It still affects the climate. Doctoral student Benedict Gast, who supervised the measurements using the so-called fluorescence lidar technique: “In these high, normally cloudless air layers, thin veil clouds form due to smoke particles.”

Solar radiation is scattered on particles and the light is slightly dimmed. That is why the sky often appears milky and slightly cloudy to us.

The link between more smoke from greater distances and increased cloud formation will now be examined more closely. Depending on their properties, clouds can have a cooling or warming effect.

“Thus, frequent and strong wildfires can have a corresponding effect on the atmospheric radiative balance. This potential motivates us to further investigate these interactions of wildfire smoke and cloud formation,” says Kast.