Worldwide inventory reveals the frequency and variability of pyrocumulonimbus and stratospheric smoke plumes during 2013–2023
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract An inventory of 761 confirmed pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) events observed worldwide during 2013-2023 answers many open questions on the inter-annual, seasonal, sub-daily, and regional variability of this hazardous fire weather phenomenon, along with potential controlling factors. It reveals that the 2023 fire season set new records for total pyroCb activity regionally (142 events in Canada alone) and worldwide (169 events). Smoke injection altitudes range from the mid-troposphere to the lower stratosphere (8–18 km), with 414 pyroCb events (55%) linked to smoke injection within 1 km of the tropopause or higher. Estimated aerosol mass in these plumes spans four orders of magnitude, which has significant implications for climate-scale radiative effects and ozone chemistry. The cumulative aerosol particle mass injected near the tropopause over an active fire season can rival that of recent extreme pyroCb events and significant volcanic eruptions. This pyroCb inventory is critical for advancing fire weather prediction capabilities to aid firefighting efforts and improving smoke transport forecasts. It sets a foundation for an Earth System Data Record that can be used to identify longer-term trends in pyroCb activity and consequent impacts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".