Turbulence over a burning forest can carry embers that spread the wildfire. To understand how wildfire plumes interact with the natural turbulence found above the forest canopy, researchers modeled the situation in a water flume. Dowel rods acted as a forest, with turbulence developing naturally from the water flowing past. For a wildfire, the researchers used a plume of warmer water, which buoyancy lofted into the turbulence over their model forest.
The flow over the forest canopy naturally forms side-by-side rolls of air rotating around a horizontal axis. As the buoyant plume rises, it can be torn apart by these rollers, as well as carried downstream. Varying the turbulence, they found, did not affect the average trajectory of the plume. But the more intense the turbulence, the greater the vertical fluctuations in the plume. Those large variations, they concluded, could lift more embers into stronger winds that distribute them further and spread a fire faster. (Image credit: wildfire – M. Brooks, experiment – H. Chung and J. Koseff; research credit: H. Chung and J. Koseff; via APS Physics)