When a wildfire burns hot enough, it starts making its own weather. And right now, no one can reliably predict when and where that’s going to happen. This can not only be extremely dangerous for firefighters on the ground, but it can also spark new fires nearby.

This is one of the least understood types of weather in the world, and that’s why NASA has gathered a team of scientists to study the storms that wildfires produce. 

This NASA-funded mission is called INSPYRE, the INjected Smoke and PYRocumulonimbus Experiment. They are studying pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb), which are thunderstorms born from the heat of a fire. 

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"We're after weather that is generated by fire," said David Peterson, the mission's lead principal investigator at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. "Specifically situations when fires generate their own clouds, pull air rapidly into the fire, and sometimes that can even grow into really large thunderstorm clouds."

Scientists are trying to improve fire weather forecasts

"It is not well predicted, it's not well understood," Peterson said. "It sort of serves as a prediction gap that can affect the firefighting effort."

This puts firefighters in a dangerous blind spot. A storm building overhead brings darkness, erratic winds, lightning and occasionally fire-generated tornadoes. Worse, Peterson said, "these storms are known to ignite their own fires downwind."

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"One big part of this is just trying to improve the forecasting for the firefighters," Peterson said. Adding, “improvements that project onto the public resilience and evacuation efforts."

The storms also act as an elevator for smoke. "It serves as a giant chimney that kind of funnels smoke upward into the atmosphere," Peterson said, releasing it at 35,000 feet or higher, which is jet cruising altitude. From there it can travel thousands of miles, sometimes circling the globe.

But every fire-generated storm pushes smoke to a different height, and winds at each altitude carry it a different direction. "Right now we're just not able to handle that with any of our forecast tools," Peterson said.

The very biggest fires send smoke even higher. NASA says the strongest of these storms can inject "volcanic-scale smoke plumes" into the stratosphere, where the smoke can circle the globe, linger for more than a year, shift stratospheric winds, and even extend the size and lifetime of the Antarctic ozone hole. Recent outbreaks in Australia and the Pacific Northwest, the mission's science plan notes, sent up stratospheric smoke "rivaling or exceeding the impacts of most volcanic eruptions."

How the mission works

For the INSPYRE mission, two aircraft do the sampling. NASA's high-altitude ER-2 works "kind of like a steerable satellite," tracking fire behavior, air motion and lightning from above. An NCAR/NSF Gulfstream V flies directly into the storm tops. A ground team chases the fire line with truck-mounted radars and lidars, while a forecasting team picks the targets. In all, more than 150 scientists are on the mission.

Peterson describes the mission as "an airborne storm chase." Unlike what NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters face, he says they usually only experience a few bumps, but says it’s startling in other ways. "It gets really dark," he said. Adding that you can sometimes even smell the smoke from inside the plane. 

One recent flight sampled the remains of a pyroCb from Utah's Widemouth Fire less than a day later, with crews reporting dark smoke layers at 40,000 feet. That smoke absorbs and reflects sunlight, warming one layer of the atmosphere while cooling another near the ground. Peterson noted, "that's not included in any weather forecast."

INSPYRE's first deployment runs through Sept. 10, with a second season planned for 2027.

"It's a very exciting time," Peterson said, "in terms of improving understanding and prediction of extreme wildfires."

Jennifer Gray is a weather and climate writer for weather.com. She has been covering some of the world's biggest weather and climate stories for the last two decades.