Chris Smith
speaker
241 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 14 Aug
Chris Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
As wildfires rage, we talk to the team studying how these infernos make their own special thunderclouds and change the weather.
Also, nanoparticles to the rescue.
Researchers have discovered a way to sneak drugs into the brain to blitz glioblastoma tumours and stop them coming back, and scientists spot the first smallpox in the Americas in two income mummies in Chile.
Fueled by the hot, dry weather, wildfires are continuing to rage in many countries.
In France and Spain, hundreds of thousands of tourists and locals have been evacuated, and winemakers in the Bordeaux region fear that smoke blowing in from the extensive fires is tainting grapes and ruining this season's wine.
In the UK, a fire on the east coast is heading for a nuclear power station, and the US and Canada are also on red alert with significant conflagrations.
The thing about massive fires is that their awesome power means that they can effectively make their own weather.
And one manifestation of this is the cloud phenomenon called pyrocumulimbus.
The intense heat and skyward ejection of ash and dust causes the formation of powerful thunderstorm systems above the fire.
Now unfortunately they don't produce much if any rain, but they are capable of dramatically accelerating the fire through wind effects and disseminating the fallout.
Beyond that, we don't know much more than the hypothetical about how they operate or how to model them.
That's hopefully going to change though, with Inspire, which is a NASA backed campaign sending a specially adapted jet bristling with sensors to chase and interrogate these fire clouds over the Western US.
Atmospheric chemist from the University of Utah, Derek Mallier, is one of the team.
Do we see a similar sort of phenomenon above volcanic eruptions?
When you see a volcano erupting ferociously, sometimes there is lightning around that.
Is that the sort of thing that's happening here?
What actually is the physics of it though?
What is going on do we think?
I mean obviously it's early days for this project and you're gonna tell us how you're gonna try and get underneath that more in a minute, but what do we think the physics of this phenomenon is?
And presumably if you start having thunderclouds, you can then get lightning strikes and they're gonna start secondary fires.
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