and fuck it, here's a science lesson that even maybe a wanka such as himself can understand:
so now that we know that the vast majority of the larger fires that are ravaging the bushlands are due to lightning storms, let us try to understand why.
As the air over a fire becomes intensely hot, it creates an upward-moving rush of wind called an updraft that funnels smoke into the atmosphere like a smokestack. As the air rises, it cools and condenses, forming clouds. The higher it lifts, the more likely it is to form a thunderstorm, says Flannigan.
“These storms create their own wind field because they have such a violent updraft. It’s a very turbulent environment,” he says.
Once formed, pyroCbs can look similar to intense thunderstorms, but they have key differences. They tend to produce lightning with positive, rather than negative charges, which lasts longer and allows the strikes of lightning more time to set the ground aflame. Fire storms also tend to stagnate, staying parked over the fires that create them. And perhaps most notably, fire storms rarely produce the precipitation desperately needed to squelch massive fires.
now this source didn't go into great detail in explaining why positive charges are more deadly than those that are negative but you're in luck because i am often curious about everything i read!
Positive lightning makes up less than 5% of all strikes. However, despite a significantly lower rate of occurrence, positive lightning is particularly dangerous for several reasons.
Since it originates in the upper levels of a storm, the amount of air it must burn through to reach the ground is usually much greater. Therefore, electric fields associated with positive Cloud-to-Ground (CG) strikes are typically much stronger than those associated with negative strikes. The flash duration is also longer with peak charge and potential up to ten times greater as compared to negative CG strikes; as much as 300,000 amperes and one billion volts!
curious, now that we know the number of amps in a positive lightning strike, we can compare it to the number of amps in say a car lighter... and a quick google search reveals that it is about 15amps which can help explain why...
The average lightning-caused fire burned 402 acres, nine times the average of 45 acres seen in human-caused wildland fires.
you can google each quote for their respective sources or you can just read this excellent article i just finished digging through earlier this morning that highlights how the aforementioned pyroCbs, or fire-induced lightning storm, are a little-known phenomenon that scientists have only begun researching in 2013 are becoming increasingly more common due to FUCKING GLOBAL WARMING, which should alarm everyone not only in drier climates "
because they have as much energy and impact as a moderate-sized volcanic eruption". but you know, environmentalist terrorists who are setting off multiple fires each are to blame for these unprecedented fires.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/fire-induced-storms-a-new-danger-from-the-rise-in-wildfires
