Wildfire full episode: Wildfires can move fast. Fueled by heat, drought, and wind, they can destroy entire neighborhoods, force thousands of people from their homes, and send smoke traveling thousands of miles. And while we tend to associate wildfires with the hot summer months, fire season looks very different depending on where you live. And in some places, the threat never really goes away. For meteorologist Jacqueline Whittall, wildfires have become personal. She spent much of her career covering extreme weather, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, she's seen a lot. But after moving to British Columbia, she found herself living in one of Canada's most fire-prone regions. It's kind of surreal to be like at any minute, I may have to pick up and leave. And if I do leave, I may never return to this home. But there's another side to the story. As wildfire season grows longer and communities face increasing risks, New technologies are changing how we detect, prepare for, and fight these fires. From artificial intelligence that can spot smoke to autonomous drones and new ways to protect homes, there's some fascinating science happening. None of these climate-induced extreme weather events are somewhere else. It's happening more in all of our own backyards. Today on Atmosphere, we're talking wildfire science. The people living with the threat and what we can do to better prepare. Meteorologist Emily Gracie, and this is Atmosphere, a podcast where science becomes conversation. Each week I sit down with the experts behind the forecasts, the research, and the headlines to explore not just the science, but the human stories behind it. Through natural curiosity, we're making science more understandable, more relatable, and hopefully bringing a little more comfort in how we experience the world around us. This episode is sponsored by Weather One Hundred. Weather One Hundred shows you how your weather ranks against 100 years of weather history. Jacqueline with all. So nice to meet you. I feel like I already know you. I know. We're one of the same. We we we're very similar, Emily. Nice to be here. Yes. And I'm so glad that you approached me about this idea of an episode about wildfires because I've been wanting to do this for a while. I admittedly am not an expert. But maybe it has to do with where I live too. And I think that plays a huge part of it. And I I know it does for you, just looking back at some of the stuff you've covered. So we're gonna get into wildfires, but I want to get a little background on you first. I know we have very similar pasts that have gone through TV and communications and now kind of digital stuff. so tell me about your background. You became a meteorologist, why? Yeah. Well, okay, so I grew up kind of like a lot young people with a bit of a fascination around weather. My dad and I used to watch thunderstorms in the garage together and I lived right along the Detroit Michigan border and the Canadian border. So when Monroe County in Michigan went tornado worn, that meant dad and I had to get down to the basement. And yeah, so I started as a young girl as a pianist and as a singer and I had dreams about being on Broadway. And I did end up doing that for eleven years, not Broadway, but I did a lot of big shows touring the world and singing and dancing on stage. And then that weather background, that nerdy passion I had as a kid, I guess came up later in my 30s. I went back to school with Mississippi State University, popular one in the US, and studied operational meteorology. And then from there I got asked to go storm chasing in 2010. And that changed my whole trajectory for my career. And I, you know, I've covered a lot of events in the field, be it hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, flooding, you name it. And so that's my background. And then that led to me sort of seeing that climate attribution piece. So some of these climate induced weather events, you know, why are we seeing these heat domes as strong as they are? And why are hurricanes becoming stronger and rapidly intensifying? And all these things I found fascinating because I'd seen them firsthand. In the field, that led me to wanting to learn more about climate communication. So I actually studied with MIT and did a sustainability certification for a year and just doubled down on as much climate storytelling as I could. And then that led me to starting my own company now, which is a communications firm called One Earth Communications. So that's me in a nutshell. So I wear many hats. You do. I I was watching some of your old footage, and for folks who are listening here in the States who don't know what the weather network is. It's like the Canadian Weather Channel, right? Yeah, totally. That's exactly what it's like. Okay. And so you did a lot of field work for them. What kind of natural disasters were you covering the most? And did you specialize in any at all? So I've covered 10 hurricanes. I've been in category five hurricanes, wrote out storms in parking garages with a bunch of guys being the only woman. And so pretty badass stuff and pretty pretty scary stuff too. But I guess, where I feel that I have a niche is is around wildfires. And that's because, Emily, in 2020, in the height of the pandemic, I moved from just outside of Toronto, Ontario, and I moved to the West Coast. I moved into the interior of British Columbia. And where I live in the Okanagan Valley is known to be probably the most fire prone area of Canada. So visually it's beautiful. It's like vineyards and orchards, kind of like your Napa Valley, California. And and actually our climate and our Our terrain is the most desert like in Canada. So the fact that we have cactus here in Canada is kind of cool. because you don't see that in in many places in Canada. And but unfortunately it's very dry and it is a valley and we get that warming as it comes down the slopes into the valley floor, and we get a lot of wildfires. So within like six months of my first year living here, I was on evacuation alert for a wildfire in my nice new home that we just bought and was very scary. And so From there, I dealt with wildfires where I live here in Verning, DC, every season since. And so I know what it's like to not only cover hurricanes or, tornadoes or flooding, but to to cover something that's impacting me. Wildfires have an impact on so many people, even if they aren't knocking at your front door. Let's go back to the science of wildfires a little bit too, because I think a lot of people when they think about weather or they think about climate, they don't necessarily make that connection with Wildfires. So can you explain why wildfires are a weather phenomenon, why they are a climate phenomenon? Yeah, you bet. in in British Columbia and certainly the Pacific Northwest, in the summer season, especially if we're in a dry summer season, which we were this season, lightning becomes such a a big factor when you're talking about wildfire starts. You can have literally hundreds, even thousands of of wildfire starts because of a few days of a trough moving through and a low pressure. system triggering a whole bunch of thunderstorms. So while you might think, I'm getting a thunderstorm, I'm going to get rained. Isn't that good? Because we're dry. True, somewhat, but sometimes we get dry lightning, right? So we don't get the beneficial rain into different areas, but we get those lightning stripes that of course strike a tree and starts a fire. And those can become out of control really quickly because where I live in British Columbia, for example, it is very vast. It's a very large province and it's very unpopulated in central and northern BC. So you can have lightning strikes that cause a lot of fires that are hard to get on right away, especially if they're if the resources in Canada are fighting other fires before they can get to those. So yeah, it gets really real when we're dealing with a dry spell like we were this summer, where, my goodness, what did I have? I had from January first to August, I had about 15 milliliters of rainfall. So I want to say that's about Two and a half to three inches of rainfall, that's it in over six months. So super dry. We were level three drought, we have water restrictions. And then all of a sudden you get this little pressure system moving through, and you've got the dry lightning risk, and it's legitimately scary. There's going to be fire starts. And so in my community, I live in what they call the wooy, which means the wildland urban interface. So that's where a city or town meets the rural. land. And so I live among beautiful pine trees and steep terrain. And it's it's gorgeous, but it's a high-risk zone for fires. And so, my road is a one way in out, one way back in road. That's it. And so we literally have our garbage cans, those ones that that get lifted up by the garbage truck, those big huge drum. Those are filled with water during the peak high high season for fire at the end of our driveway. At all times, just in case someone in the neighborhood might see a fire start and you could get to it before the officials could even get here. So it gets scary. Wow. What an interesting thing. I wouldn't even think of that. okay. Well, I want to hear more about some of those preparation things in a little bit, but going back to like the climate, I know that's a very big question, a very broad question, but can you tell me about how wildfires and climate are connected and then what you've seen in the past few decades that you've been witnessing this firsthand. Yeah. So I mean, I must be honest that I probably only really witnessed a lot of wildfires firsthand for about the last six years. So I can't speak to like maybe the last couple of decades. But what I can say and what I have learned is that these wildfires can definitely be attributed and have been attributed to a warming climate. And the reason why, and you probably know this as a meteorologist, but With anything, whether it's a a rainy pattern or a dry pattern, it's about our jet stream really becoming amplified, right? So we've got these big ridges in place for several days, even weeks, bringing extreme heat and dry conditions. And then maybe somewhere else in the world, we've got a dip in the jet stream bringing stalled rainy pattern with maybe flooding in some part of the world. So what we're seeing a lot of across North America in particular. And wildfires are global, but just to speak to here, we're seeing these patterns that really lock in for weeks on end and hot and dry patterns. And that can lead to a very active wildfire season. Now we never can attribute one season to climate change, but we're seeing these fire seasons last longer. We're seeing the begin earlier. In Canada, we have something called zombie fires. And this is kind of crazy. I know we're getting close to Halloween, but it's actually what they call a zombie fire is a fire that stays like the the smoldering part of the fire stays below the snowpack. So the snow falls, it covers, but it actually never really goes out. And then the next spring, these fires can actually just pop up as the snow melt and and all of a sudden you're dealing with a fire still. So I've actually seen these zombie fires cover two years, one year and then another year and going on three years. So it's crazy. And these are Happening and it's hard to get ahead of those, right right away, in the spring season. So some pretty fascinating things. I guess the important message is that we can never link one fire season to climate change or even a few. As we have to look at a much larger time frame to attribute these seasons to climate change. But we are seeing these prolonged heat events. We're seeing these prolonged droughts. You know, this year where I live, I've never seen in the last six years a drought like what we've just gone through. And then now, Emily, as we're talking about El Nino and this super El Nino. Well, in the Pacific Northwest of the US and in Canada and the western provinces of Canada, this is bad news on top of bad news. Because we're gonna get into a winter season that's now gonna be dry because of El Nino, and we're just getting off a very dry summer. So that means we start the fire season next spring, likely in bad shape, unless the pattern can change extremely vastly come spring and we get a ton of rainfall. But Not likely. So I hope that answers it. It's it's these prolonged patterns that really set us up for these catastrophic wildfires. And then we talk about these fire seasons that are kind of not the norm. Like let's look at the Palisades, right? A couple of years ago in January in California. I mean, normally devastating fires aren't happening in January in California. We look to California this time of year with the Santa Ana winds, but not January. So these are like anomalous. situations that we're not used to seeing. Interesting. So when is the season? And it does it differ based on location? It does, yes. I can tell you for Canada, for example, our season's winding down. So early spring into the summer as we get into peak heating and peak dry hot weather and then also thunderstorm risk in the in the summer for us in Canada happens later, say than in the central parts of the US, we see the jet streams migrate north. But, there's different, like you say, there's there's different geographical influences like California. This is the time of year where we start to see those offshore winds, those Santa Ana winds coming from the heat of the land to the ocean. And that can trigger fires in California, even in the fall, when say, you know, Oregon and Washington and British Columbia are starting to simmer down. So it's And then the other important thing too, I know we're highlighting North America, but fire seasons are global and are happening all year long. So as we start to relax, areas like Australia or parts of South America, Chile has a very active wildfire season. They just get going in our winter season. Gotcha. Okay. So yeah, I I live along the east coast, southeast coast. And so for me, it's I almost think of everything relatable back to hurricanes. And so my mind is going to parallels with hurricane season and then there's these anomalies where sometimes a storm pops up outside of the season and that gets to be more frequent as we go through time. So interesting. I'm learning a lot about this. This is very helpful. okay. Well I I didn't learn about wildfires in college. It was not part of my education. but it's so important because it is such a huge part of our job to explain hazards and and fire weather to people. So as far as what the public looks at when they're watching wildfires, what do you see as far as misunderstandings? What do you think people need to know about, maybe don't know about, or or know the wrong information? That's a really good. question and I think that something that the public and even you know government so whether it's provincial here in Canada or state government or federal levels it's about changing our awareness around wildfires to a preparedness kind of state rather than a reaction. You know the idea is that you want to be prepared before the fire season happens. When we're talking about a hurricane as you know in the southeast we really can't prepare too much ahead of the storm. we're gonna start boarding up our windows, we're gonna start putting sandbags ahead of an event, we're gonna evacuate, of course. When it comes to wildfires, we can put things in place many, many months ahead of a wildfire and potential rips. And some of those solutions can be technology driven. and some of them can be simple and some of them can be like AI powered and super advanced. The idea is that right now, in the quieter time of year, this is not. Time to put our feet up and go, well, good, we're good till next April or May. What we need to be, that's what we want to do. So true, right? It's like out of sight, out of mind. And I I think you're right. And it's like, you it's the this as a meteorologist with hurricanes, it only takes one, right? So it's like, okay, we're in a we're in an El Nino year. It's not going to be active. that's that's a next year's problem. No, we just saw a major hurricane intensify in the Gulf and just mere Hours, right? So the point is, is it only takes one storm and it only takes one fire. And so maybe you've been able to avert the risk so far, but how do we prepare ourselves and our homes and our properties and our businesses and all of our infrastructure so that we're safe for next fire season? So I think it's about shifting our mindset, and that is a global statement that we can't wait until the firefront is. moving into our community. We can't wait until the evacuation perimeter is in our backyard and say, now it's time to figure it out. No, we need to have our go bag ready, much like hurricane prep. We need to be prepared to leave, but we need to do things well ahead of the season. What is normal weather? Between dramatic headlines, record this, extreme that, and hundreds of weather apps all showing you basically the same information, it can be surprisingly hard to tell what's actually unusual. That's where Weather 100 comes in. Weather 100 is a minimalist desktop weather display that compares your local weather with the last 100 years of history, showing you how unusual it really is. From today's maximum temperature to last month's rainfall to this week's highest wind speed. 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But yeah, I'm working with a really fantastic company here in Canada, in Alberta, Canada. They're Indigenous owned. They're called CJS Industrial. And they have a wildfire solution, a protection solution that they call Rufus, rural urban fire suppression system. And Rufus is basically you know, those shipping containers that you would see on a right, on a freighter. So it's basically a sea can. that is filled with two drums of water. So pre-filled, this is the important part. So water is brought in this unit to a place. Let's call it a community in northern Alberta or northern British Columbia. In fact, many of their use cases are put on indigenous lands because it's harder to get resources in those remote communities when a fire is actually happening. So the idea is that you would place this months in advance of a potential fire in front of a critical piece of infrastructure. We talk about indigenous communities that could be a community center, that can cost millions of dollars to replace and is very dear to this community. So you would have this unit, it is pre-filled with water. It's got a 360 degree telescopic arm that sprays water around the perimeter and on the roof and the building itself. And why that is important? Because it creates a humidity bubble. So most fires that are moving into a community have an ember shower. So that's the little burning embers that are happening from this massive fire that get brought in with the strong winds well ahead of the fire. And in fact, many starts happen because of these ember showers. So by wetting and pre treating a building or home ahead of the time, it's it's already surfacially wet. So it has a almost zero chance of igniting when a fire moves in. So this is really simple kind of approach in that you can control it on your iPhone, you can remotely watch it from afar. So let's say you're evacuated, you can watch this, you can see what's happening in real time, and you can turn it on or off. It has a generator, so you're not relying on local power, which is one of the first things to go down, and you're not relying on the local water because that becomes crucial, as we saw in the Palisades fire. So that's one piece of technology. On the same thought, in terms of Water. There's another company in California and they are called platypus sprinklers. Now we've all heard of rooftop sprinkler systems. That can be an integral part of wildfire defense because the same idea, it'll create this humidity bubble around your home, your property. but the difference again with platypus sprinklers as opposed to other sprinklers that I've seen in the US, and I say platypus is the number one in the US, is that They too are not competing with the water source, the local town water. They will draw from a cistern that is on site separately that would be set up ahead of the fire. They might draw on your local swimming pool. They could draw on a reservoir, like one of those rain wet reservoirs, a lake that's nearby. So really thoughtful in that again, not competing with the wildfire. emergency response because they need those resources. So I really love what they're doing. Super innovative. They have like temperature and weather controls on these sensors that would, you know, say when you should be wetting the property down. So pretty cool stuff. But it's kind of wild to me that like this humidity bubble you talk about would protect it from a wildfire. But that a season of snowpack can land on top of an old wildfire and not completely put it out. Like that's Mind blowing to me. I'd agree. The only the only thing I can think of is it's like it's almost acting as like an insulation layer. it's like it's not enough. That's my guess, but there's not enough melting. And it's just so cold that it's like never melting. Yes. Okay. Another good point. Okay. Well, and I know you were talking about before we got on, I saw your notes about Australia too. And I've heard a lot about bushfires in Australia. Is there a technology that they're working on? Yeah, so great company called Fire Foresight. They are a wildfire intelligence company. So they use a network of cameras that are powered by AI to basically determine smoke, potential smoke, potential fire in an area. And then all of that information is ingested into things like wildfire modeling. Obviously, human verification processes and alerts would be tied into all this. But they are doing some amazing work. They teamed up with a few other companies where they were starting to integrate drone technology. And so they're still, I think, in the development phase with their drone edition, but this is like Jetsons kind of stuff, right? Like, think about that. We are eventually going to be fighting fires. The idea of like autonomous drones flying about, no risk to fire personnel, because they're able to bring these. heavy payloads of water to a destination put out fires. That's remarkable to me that we're there. And we actually are, this is already happening in Colorado. Drones are being integrated with with local government and starting to be tested in real time. So pretty exciting stuff. Cool. but you know, most of the time when we see wildfires on the news, we see some sort of aircraft flying over and then like something coming out of it that isn't really look like water. Can you explain what we're seeing there? Yeah, great question. So a lot of what you're seeing is something we call fire retardant. So that's like that red stuff that ends up being sprayed across a mountainside where there's a wildfire. And it does wonders. But the problem with a lot of these retardants is that they haven't been environmentally friendly. So that's been a big initiative within the wildfire industry to do better in that way. And there's this wonderful new company called Citrotech. Actually, I don't know how new they are, but they're certainly they just rang the bell on the New York Stock Exchange. So they're really growing rapidly. And a lot of people in the wildfire space are all very pro Citrotech. And the reason is it is it's like that, let's call it sauce. It's like that red sauce you're talking about that's sprayed, but it's environmentally sound. And so now what people are really looking into is how can we treat things like building materials. there's a company called Wildfire Pro Shop. They're located in Nevada, I believe. And they're using CitrTech to use on building materials. And so, you know, how can we build more effectively with with this kind of product integrated into you know the the home building process so that you're that much more protected? So it's really fascinating. What a time to be alive, right? With the advent of AI and all these wonderful. different products and and technologies. But yeah, so the red stuff you've seen historically has been no good, but we're doing a lot better and it's very effective. Sometimes water is needed, sometimes retardants are needed. And usually to create a very integral break or to, you know, to to create kind of a fire line. I think retardants do a really good job at that. But I'm not an expert when it comes to that. Gotcha. do you know much? I know that These are all great technologies, but there's also these people that are like jumping out of planes and into the fire called smoke jumpers. And this was a whole fascinating field that I didn't know anything about until a few years ago when I interviewed one. So is that job still very important and necessary? And can you explain what they're doing? I think that what a lot of people forget is how much work is being done on the ground in a wildfire. These are the bravest men and women in my mind. Maybe military would also be up there, but imagine and and the smoke risk and and just the risk in general. And we thank them for all of their efforts. And so all of these supporting technologies that help those smoke jumpers, the repel crews, is a good thing because the more we can take the the risk away from those folks, you know, the more that we can go in there with autonomous options like robots and. And drones and things like that is a good thing. Sometimes, and I've seen this in British Columbia, we literally cannot fly. we often do a lot of fire suppression with helicopters with the buckets you've probably seen, and then they they dump the bucket of water, and then it goes like I live near a lake and it comes and grabs another bucket of these are massive buckets. we think they're called vanvies as a company. But anyway, this is a way of fighting fires very effectively. But sometimes if the conditions are not good, if you don't have good visibility, so it's super smoky, you can't bucket, you can't fly those helicopters. there are times where actual water bomber aircraft, the ones that pick up the water on the lake and drop the water, not the red stuff, but the water, they can't fly because it's too dangerous. You cannot see the visit visuals are not there. So the idea of drones really takes the risk away from all of those people that are doing this amazing work. And you think about drones, they could fight overnight. A lot of the aircraft has to shut down at night. And I can tell you that living in a fire prone area, when you have a big fire, you're on evacuation alert and you need to go to bed, and that the fire crews have shut down for the night, it's very scary. And you just can't wait until the next morning when they get the crews going on it again. So to think about how drones can help that is just amazing. Is it ever detrimental to put out Like I'm thinking about, you know, we're building in places that we didn't used to be. We're have more people living in places that they didn't used to live. And I'm wondering about the balance here of I know that some wildfires are supposed to happen, right? So how do you find this balance of what should burn and what shouldn't burn? And when should we step back and not throw all of our arsenal at Well, there's many different theories to that, Emily, because when you think about the indigenous people that have been on these lands for forever and and way before us, fires are are nothing new. they knew how to mitigate the risk, how to properly burn, and you know, they would have like different sort of pre prescribed burns in a way to mitigate future risks. I think we really need to lean on indigenous knowledge because they know. so much more about the land than any of us. I believe that. but then from more of a like scientific standpoint, you're right. Like sometimes there's there's theories that we're fighting too many fires or we're we're putting out too many fires that maybe we should have left burn. The problem is, is like you said, our footprints growing. So you know you might say, well, maybe that fire, I don't know, like some of these natural cycles do need to happen. There are certain types of mushrooms and things like that that I've heard that grow only after a wildfire. They can be a food source for certain wildlife. there are reasons that fires are good. The problem is that our foot footprints growing in the Wooe, the wildland urban interface. And that's happening around the world. So now fires are knocking on our doors because we're expanding. Vibrant Planet, which is a California-based company that Really do what you're talking about. They decide where wildfire prevention work can make the biggest difference. So basically their platform combines landscape data with wildfire modeling. They're looking at things like, where is the best spot to be fighting a fire versus maybe a spot that wouldn't be so good? So they're looking at vegetation and fuels information, some exposed assets, for example, or ecological values. Where can we assess the risk coming from and Where is the highest risk based on some of those fuel types and and that sort of thing? So again, technology based, right? Because we're looking at ex wildfire modeling, which is becoming a growing industry. and then the advent of AI within not only weather modeling, but wildfire modeling. Yeah, it's a tough question, you know, like especially we've kind of made our bed here with climate change too. So We gotta we gotta deal with the consequences. Okay. Well, I wanna hear about your personal stories with wildfires too, because it's one thing to talk about them from a distance, but you've actually been in these and it's not like chasing a tornado or a hurricane. There's lots of meteorologists doing that. I don't often hear of meteorologists who are chasing wildfires. So can you tell me about the experience of that? Because it's gotta be terrifying. And dangerous as far as smoke inhalation, I can assume. Well, yeah, it's a that's a good assumption. Yes, you're right. there are times where I have to be wearing the N thirty-five mask and making sure that I'm protected well out and reporting. but you know, w when it comes to wildfires, there's different phases. You know, we we rank them in different levels. So, you know, a rank one or two fire would be different than a higher ranked fire, much like a hurricane is intensity is is ranked. When I moved to British Columbia from Toronto. I didn't know anything about wildfires really either. This was only about six years ago. And I thought that these wildfires would just be like these massive clouds and flames everywhere. And sometimes they can be that for sure. But what's happening more often with wildfires, and I've seen this more and more, is that there are multiple hot spots, if you can imagine. So if you imagine a treed mountainside, it's not like the whole mountain necessarily is engulfed in flames at one point. We hope. Sometimes, yes, that can happen, but more often it's crews that are fighting certain sections of that wildfire. So all of a sudden you have a flare up because maybe winds have just picked up. And now this little area that was like just think about it like a campfire. you you you blow on it, or if you put a fan next to the campfire, it's gonna, it's gonna with all the oxygen start to grow. So it's the same with wind gusts. It's like all of a sudden somewhere that was maybe smoldering and seemed to be on control or at bay has now flared up again. So it's almost like you'll watch a wildfire in real time and you'll see bucketers, the helicopters with the buckets, or you'll see water bomber aircraft crews that are constantly hitting different areas of that mountainside. So one area is all of a sudden flared up. Okay, they've got that under control. All right. Then a few years, a few hours later, they're moving over here and they're hitting a different section. So that was a neat thing for me to see because I just envisioned it very differently. It's constant activity on a wildfire, which of course has a perimeter. the whole area is is is designated as the perimeter and the rate of spread and how far it's spread. And then of course you have your evacuation alerts and orders. And then for anyone that doesn't know the difference, an evacuation of alert is that you are alerted that you could have to evacuate. And an order means you must go now. I can't tell you how scary it is. It's surreal to be like at any minute I may have to pick up and leave. And if I do leave, I may never return to this home. And it like a lot of people like my parents who are living back in Ontario, Canada, are like, my gosh, how do you deal with that? It's not fun. But it's like asking you who lives on the Southeast Coast, how do you deal with these monster hurricanes? How do they deal with tornadoes in Oklahoma City? That's the that's the threat that you have where you live. And you just grow used to it and you prepare. it's a risk. But in many ways, maybe the rest of the year makes up for those scary moments. but you know, I can also remember Emily like, gosh, I could send you so many pieces of footage. You know, literally the sky is red. Like, I mean red, not even orange, red, and it's like four o'clock in the afternoon. And the smoke is so dense and the fire is so close, and I'm literally on my back porch sweeping off burning embers. And any one of those embers. Could start a fire. And when you are completely surrounded by dry timber, it's very, very scary. And and then we talk about Emily's smoke. I mean, let's look at the smoke in the last four to five years. How many times has the Great Lakes, Chicago, Detroit, New York City been completely South Carolina. South Carolina even. We've gotten it too. And it's like it yes, and the and that smoke is coming from our jet stream in the Canadian North. But by contrast, in Canada, there have been several summers where I've got smoke from California and Washington fires being brought up by a southwest flow with the jet stream into into BC and we're nowhere near the fires, or that year we're having a good fire season and we're sucked in in the valley with smoke. And so I think that's an a a message to everyone that like none of these climate induced extreme weather events are somewhere else. You know what I mean? It's like it's happening more in all of our own backyards. So if maybe you're not impacted by the fires themselves, maybe you're impacted by smoke. Smoke travels right across the Atlantic Ocean into Europe with the dead stream. So yeah, it's changing our thinking. Climate induced weather events are happening everywhere. And they're no longer someone else's problem. They're in our own backyards. Have you ever been in a situation where were like, this might not be okay. yeah, this summer there was a a fire that was just a couple of miles away from my home. It was across the lake, but the lake is only about a couple miles in width. So you think, well, the the lake would separate you. That that should be fine. No, because when we're talking about ember showers, those embers are what can start fires elsewhere when the winds pick those up. And fires can jump a body of water. So this past summer. we had a fire called the Bradley Creek fire, very close to my home. I was on evacuation alert and I was out covering the fire because as a climate communicator and as a journalist and meteorologist, I thought, well, the best way I know to help is to communicate on social media like what I'm seeing and and help tell that story. So off I went, did some stand-ups right to camera, got some footage, and then all of a sudden my heart just dropped because I realized that what am I doing? I'm out covering this fire right now. My husband's at home getting things packed up, likely. My pets are there. Why am I out here? I have to go home and prepare. And so I did. I drove home and he had a lot prepared and we never ended up having to leave. But that one day was like, I need to get where I need to be right now. enough of this storytelling part. And it was scary. It makes me think I've talked to female storm chasers before. And they've really pointed out the differences between what sometimes male storm chasers do and the way that female stormchasers operate. Have you noticed some differences there being a female storm chaser, which is a rarity? Well, firstly, I'd love to know what some of their perspectives are. I would love to hear more about that. I think women as a whole have a different approach when it comes to communicating risk and being empathetic, I think, to communities. that's just our nature, not to say men can't be. Of course they can be. But I do think, my job is to earn people's trust. And as a woman, I feel that I naturally do that. I don't know why. I do know why. I think I have a trait from my mom. My mom is a very warm, welcoming lovely person and she is the type of woman that could walk in the room and just light up the room. And I hope that I have those same qualities and that I can walk into a disaster zone and earn people's trust. And I think I do and I think I have. So not to say a male couldn't do that. Of course they can, but I just think I don't know, the the maternal sort of mothering, nurturing side of women can come through in a very high stakes situation. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's an interesting I the empathy is Makes total sense. the friend that I had talked to talked about self-preservation side of it too, which is, made me think of that when you were talking about uh-oh, I need to go home and take care of my house and my family. she spoke about, the men driving into tornadoes and the hail damage on the windshields, whereas she tends to capture the beauty of a storm from afar, from a safer distance. Interesting. Yeah. Some little intricacies there. Yes. Okay, a little bit of a pivot. We talked about how weather and your meteorologists, we talked about how weather can cause wildfires. But can you talk to me about how wildfires can cause weather when we talk about clouds or we've seen these fire tornadoes on TV before, too. Yeah, pretty fascinating stuff. There's there's where the guys would probably want to come in. They if they were chasing, they would want that pyro queue, right? They want the pyro. Uh-huh. A hundred percent. They want they want the visual of that. Pyrocuminal limbus cloud. So we think about a thunderstorm, a regular cuminal imbus storm that produces yeah, things like downdrafts and lightning, rain. When it comes to fire, we can actually see these smoke plumes and this extreme heat rising from a fire start to create a thunderstorm cloud from that extreme heat. And it's fascinating. And not every fire produces a pyrocuminal limbus cloud. but some do, and I've witnessed one this summer, and but it's cyclical, it's a bad situation because it might be visually incredible, and they are from a meteorological standpoint. It's incredible the fact that this is now causing its own weather. But what it can do also is it it starts to create its own wind environment and it can actually start to create things like, yeah, a fire tornado. So a fire whirl, if you will, and that's meteorologically happening different than say a supercellular tornado where you've got a mesocyclone that's spinning. this is all heat driven and not so much moisture driven and things like that. But it's it's all these wind variations that can start to do wild things in the middle of a fire. And then unfortunately, these strong winds can start fueling that fire. So its own thunderstorm is now making the fire worse, not to mention. the lightning risk. And now you've got more fire starts because of this basically thunderstorm generated by a fire. Do they ever create a thunderstorm with a downpour that can actually be beneficial? Or is the wind and the lightning going to be the bigger threat? Are they going to overtake? I think to my knowledge, the bigger threat is going to be the wind and the lightning element to that because it's so hot and so dry that you're not going to be able to retain enough moisture to have any sort of benefit, It's like it's an isolated weather system right over that fire. so yeah, unfortunately it's like bad news on top of bad news. Some rainfall, boy, that would help. But what are the long-term consequences of that, you know? Okay. Well, you know, we're getting into a quieter season. What can we do now to prepare for the next wildfire season? So We look at again, geographically speaking, California right now wouldn't be deemed quiet because they've got the Santa Ana winds risk. So they're in the midst of their fire season. But with areas most of the Western US, particularly the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada, this is our time to prepare. This is our time to talk to our local municipalities, our local government, and so on and have those conversations. And this is the time for technology companies like some of the ones that I've mentioned. to really start planning ahead of a fire season next year because it's about that pre-preparedness element so that we're not reacting when all of a sudden the flames are at our door. And that gives us a lot of time to do that. Personally, I think that because of the smoke making it to South Carolina and the smoke making it into New York City and blanketing the city. And that's almost it's a bad thing, but it's a good thing. And I say it's a good thing because now it's triggering more conversation around what we need to do to mitigate these fires and protect homes from the these fires. So it's bad, but it's like it's an awareness. So let's talk about it and have those conversations. Thank you to Jacqueline Whittle for joining me on this episode of Atmosphere to talk about wildfires. Give her a follow on Instagram. It's linked in the show notes. If today's episode sparked any questions, or if you just want to talk weather, you can connect with me on Facebook as Meteorologist Emily Gracie, or follow along on Instagram at AtmospherePodcast. You can also pitch me ideas for future episodes. Tell me what you want to learn about. And for those who like to go beyond the audio, I'm also publishing deeper dives, episode recaps, and extra content every week over on Substack. If that sounds like your sort of thing, I'd love for you to subscribe and join my community there. I'm meteorologist Emily Gracie. Thanks for taking the time to slow down, stay curious, and explore our atmosphere.