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In a hangar in Broomfield, Colorado, a Gulfstream V jet plane is getting last-minute checks before it heads out on a daring mission. The aeroplane is part of a NASA campaign that will, for the first time, extensively sample ‘fire clouds’ — towering, mushroom-like formations that reach into Earth’s upper atmosphere above extremely large and hot wildfires, such as those now burning in France, Spain and the Pacific Northwest.

“We’re seeing these intense fires and unpredictable behaviours,” says Teresa Campos, an atmospheric chemist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, who works on the project. “It definitely feels like an important topic to be researching.”

So far, scientists have collected only one sample of fresh smoke in the stratosphere above a pyroCb. All other data come from research planes, flying for other purposes, doing ‘sniff tests’ to measure high-altitude smoke. “This time, it’s going to be more than a sniff,” Peterson says.

BROOMFIELD, Colo. — Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And sometimes, where there’s fire, there’s a towering pyrocumulonimbus cloud blasting that smoke high into the atmosphere.

Fire-generated thunderstorms — which scientists liken to powerful volcanoes that can shoot smoke 50,000 feet into the air — are the subject of a new, first-of-its-kind NASA research mission that will require a specially-outfitted, Broomfield-based NCAR plane to fly into the storms.

“Not only are we trying to predict which fires produce these storms, but also understand, once they inject smoke really high, what are the potential effects downstream,” Dave Peterson, the project’s principal investigator and a Naval Research Lab meteorologist, told Denver7.

Already in the Western U.S. this year, there have been 11 of these firestorm events, according to Peterson, with at least six of them occurring over Colorado wildfires.

Some wildfires don't just burn, they create their own thunderstorms. And now, a NASA-led mission based in Colorado is taking to the skies to figure out why.

"There are many parts of this that are still not well understood. There's only so much you can do looking from space with satellites, but at some point you actually have to get aircraft and go up there and measure it." [Dave Peterson]

Dave Peterson is preparing to do just that as NASA and partners prepare to fly high above wildfires to try and figure out how smoke and intense heat can produce thunderstorms.

[Taken from video transcript]

NASA’s INjected Smoke and PYRocumulonimbus Experiment, or INSPYRE, is a five-year project to examine the type of severe weather generated directly by large wildfires. Through INSPYRE, NASA and its partners, including NCAR, will fly planes into fire-generated clouds, called pyrocumulonimbus, that can sometimes grow into full-sized thunderstorms resulting in lightning and tornadoes.

“So this phenomenon, it’s kind of a new scientific topic,” INSPYRE principal investigator Dave Peterson said during a media event on Tuesday. “It’s not well understood. It’s also not well predicted. And so we’ve assembled a very large group of scientists from many different agencies, universities and other collaborators to tackle this challenge.”

The experiment seeks to improve scientists’ understanding of the firestorm clouds, including which fires produce these storms and why. A deeper understanding could lead to better predictions for air quality, smoke and weather, helping to inform firefighting efforts and community response and resilience. Researchers will start analyzing data as they collect it.

“Anytime you’re studying fires, you’re trying to learn more about their behavior and what gets them going so that research can really focus on safety and health of the public,” said Cory Wolff, INSPYRE’s project manager at NCAR. “So we’re hoping that down the road, what comes out of this can really start to have impacts for the people here because we live with it most summers.”

In the devastating wildfires in France, officials said that firefighters had encountered a dangerous phenomenon that many of them had not seen before: a pyrocumulonimbus, or “fire cloud.”

These large, fire-fueled thunderstorms, also known as pyroCbs, are created by intense heat from large blazes or volcanic eruptions. They produce lightning and burning embers that can spark more fires, and they generate high and unpredictable winds that fan the flames and spread the embers. But they rarely bring rain.

One pyrocumulonimbus generated more blazes over the weekend in one of the hardest-hit areas of France, Marc Vermeulen, the director of fire and emergency services in the Gironde region, said at a news briefing on Sunday.

“These fire-generated clouds are linked to extreme fire behavior that impedes firefighting efforts and can devastate communities,” according to NASA, which emphasized the need to better understand the clouds “given the ongoing and projected increases in fire activity and severity.”

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory is leading a NASA airborne science mission to better understand dangerous wildfire-generated thunderstorms known as pyrocumulonimbus storms, or pyroCb, and the cascading hazards they create for firefighting operations, aviation, weather forecasting and national security.

“Pyrocumulonimbus is a unique type of severe weather linked specifically to wildfires,” said David Peterson, Ph.D., research meteorologist at NRL Monterey and principal investigator for INSPYRE. “Some of these storms produce significant lightning and others produce very little. We know that lightning can ignite new fires, but we don’t yet understand what drives those differences. INSPYRE gives us our first opportunity to study that process with a full suite of airborne lightning measurements.”

The mission, called the Injected Smoke and PYRocumulonimbus Experiment, or INSPYRE, is expected to deploy in midsummer 2026 and 2027, using NASA’s high-altitude ER-2 aircraft based in Great Falls, Montana, to study wildfire-driven storms across the western United States and parts of Canada. A second aircraft, NSF/NCAR’s Gulfstream V, will conduct in-situ sampling directly inside pyroCb plumes in 2026, while a ground team led by the University of Nevada, Reno will deploy mobile radar and lidar systems near active fires.

INSPYRE team member Jasna Pittman, part of the Harvard HUPCRS+ instrument team, recently visited Woburn Memorial High School to speak with approximately 40 tenth-grade physics students about airborne science, NASA research aircraft, and the ongoing work of the INSPYRE mission.

As budding future scientists, the students had an opportunity to see how a real-world Earth science mission operates and to learn about the many different pathways scientists, engineers, researchers, and support teams take to contribute to NASA missions and airborne field campaigns. Outreach opportunities like these help connect classroom learning to active scientific research and encourage students to imagine themselves pursuing future careers in STEM fields.

Students were excited to learn about the wide range of projects and career paths represented within NASA and INSPYRE, and were especially thrilled to receive NASA and INSPYRE outreach items provided by the ESPO team.

Following the visit, teachers shared the positive impression the presentation left on students and the excitement it generated around science and research careers. The response was so enthusiastic that Jasna has already been invited back to continue sharing mission updates and campaign experiences with the class.

For more information, contact Jasna Pittman.

The Line fire had burned through more than 21,000 acres of Southern California when officials announced Monday morning that it was only 3 percent contained. Amid record temperatures, the blaze quickly ate through dry vegetation, injuring three firefighters and leading to evacuation orders for more than 6,000 people across San Bernardino County.
 

It’s just one of 67 large wildfires currently burning across more than two million acres of the country. While the end of summer has typically meant a slowdown of major wildfires, climate change has upended that seasonal pattern.

So what’s different about today’s wildfire weather?