(Might be wrong flair) Smoke from smaller campfires, house fires, etc go away after a while. Even though there is so much more smoke from the wildfires, how is it still able to travel across multiple states without going away?
Edit: Dissipate, not dissappear
In: 33
They dissipate, they don’t disappear. Too much smoke and it takes longer and more area to dissipate.
Well it has to go somewhere, Earth is more or less a closed system.
Sufficiently large emissions of smoke and ash from volcanic activity or wildfires can dump so much material into the atmosphere that it circles the entire hemisphere. Eventually it will rain/settle out, but that can take weeks or months depending on the season and weather patterns.
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>Smoke from smaller campfires, house fires, etc go away after a while.
This is false. It does not “go away” rather because it’s a large amount of air and a small amount of smoke you eventually reach a place where you can’t detect it anymore.
Where’s with a wild fire, the amount of smoke is SO LARGE but the amount of air on the planet earth is the same. SO it takes longer to dilute the same way.
Think of it this way. Lets say you own a lake house that has a lakefront beach AND a swimming pool (super fancy).
You are lounging in the pool, and I walk up to the edge of the pool and piss into it. You’d likely be upset because your swimming pool now has piss in it. On the other hand, if you are swimming in the lake and I walked up and piss into the lake, you’d be much less upset. This is because the piss to water ratio is much more favorable in the lake than it is in the pool.
There’s more of it.
“Smoke” is a combination of gasses and particulates.
When you burn wood you get both complete and partial oxidation. That basically takes a bunch of the carbon in wood and attaches one or two oxygen atoms to it to produce carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. You also get a bunch of stuff that doesn’t turn into a gas but just gets degraded to tiny little particles. That stuff is the main part of smoke you can see and smell.
When the wind blows the smoke around it also mixes it with air around it.
You can see and smell smoke when the concentrations of those particulates are high enough. When you have a little campfire, those concentrations aren’t that high to begin with* and there’s a lot of clean air around it to dilute the smoke. When you have a giant forest fire, there are many more particulates in the first place and the wind tends to mix that air with smokey air from other parts of the forest fire.
*Forrest fires can actually burn more cleanly since the giant updrafts can oxygenate them well but the sheer mass of material that’s being burnt means you’ll have more particulates overall.
This is due to weather more than anything.
Typically the heat from the fire helps carry smoke high into the atmosphere where it effects people less. Right now the weather patterns are holding the smoke low and preventing it from rising above us.
It also goes much higher up in the atmosphere due to the sheer quantity of material and heat. There is significantly less air per volume in the upper atmosphere for the mass of rising dust and ash to dissipate across. So the ash up there dissipates farther and faster before falling than it usually can spread at lower altitudes.
This is probably simpler than you’re thinking. It’s literally just “there’s more smoke”.
Camp fire smoke doesn’t “go away”, it just gets thinner / less dense as it spreads over a larger area. There’s a certain thickness of smoke you can smell, and a certain thickness you can see. Any thinner than that, and you can’t see or smell it. So when you get far enough away from a camp fire, the smoke is thin enough that you can’t detect it and conclude that it has “gone away” / dissipated / etc. All that means is “spread too thin to see or smell”.
Well, wild fires make a lot more smoke. So much smoke that even when you spread it over hundreds of miles, it’s still dense enough to see, and sometimes even smell. That’s all there is to it – **it IS dissipating, exactly like smoke from other sources does. There’s just so much of it that the dissipated-enough-that-you-don’t-see-it point is hundreds of miles away rather than the 20 foot plume from a campfire.**
It has dissipated. But there’s just so much of it that the dissipated version is still smellable.
If you see thick smoke it’s because you happen to be downstream from where the wind happens to be pushing it.
It creates a lot more particles then a normal fire. Heck there were haze issues last year just from wind and the sahara desert all the way over in kansas city https://amp.kansascity.com/news/weather-news/article262581892.html
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