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PHOENIX (3TV / CBS 5) – Last summer it seemed like every week we were reporting on different parts of our state that were on fire. It was even worse for our next door neighbor, California.
The Southwest region has seen the highest number of acres of land burned this century, over one million acres burned. And we could see it in our sunsets. They could make cute social media posts, but Dr Randy Cerveny, esteemed ASU professor at the School of Geographic Sciences, said: This smoke actually helped reduce the intensity of the monsoon. We haven’t had that much rain because of all the forest fires we’ve had in the West last year, and that makes sense! “
As for the monsoon, 2020 was forgettable.
And Dr Cerveny should know that. The legendary scholar is internationally known for his published work on all things meteorological. And he’s seen it all from the Tempe campus, where he’s been teaching since 1986. He stepped out of Play-Doh to show us what is needed in the atmosphere to make the raindrops fall.
“In order for it to rain, water doesn’t collect around it. It actually has to collect on something. Dust and other things like smoke are what we call the seeds of. a raindrop. In order for a raindrop to form, you have to have something that it can build up on. It doesn’t build up on itself. So at the top of the atmosphere, which was going to happen, these are water droplets that start to form on, or collect on, a dust particle. heavier. As they get heavier, they start to fall. They start to fall. fall into other dust particles. As they fall from the cloud, they will fall in the form of a large raindrop, ”explains Dr Cerveny.
“The key with smoke, in terms of lack of precipitation, is that the smoke puts too much of these condensation nuclei, these seeds into the atmosphere. So that we don’t get as much water that collects on it. a single drop or on a single seed and they stay hanging in the sky. They don’t fall together and don’t merge into one big drop. So when we put a lot of things in the atmosphere, it actually removes them. We don’t get as much rain when we have heavy smoke days, like when we have a moderate smoke day, ”added Dr Cerveny.
In July and August – especially August – you will notice that it is quite humid here. This humidity is the fuel for our summer thunderstorms.
Too much smoke last year caused another problem. It has blocked some of the sunlight hitting our desert floor. We need that summer heat, or the hot air rising from the desert, for thunderstorms to form. When we had all that smoke, we had less air coming up from the ground. So that was equivalent to fewer thunderstorms.
So something is always needed for raindrops to form in our atmosphere. But too much smoke actually hampered the development of our storm last year.
Copyright 2021 KPHO / KTVK (KPHO Broadcasting Corporation). All rights reserved.
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