A NASA high-altitude research aircraft recently conducted flights over the wildfires in British Columbia to enhance the understanding of weather phenomena triggered by large fires. The ER-2 plane, which took off from Great Falls, Montana, flew multiple times over B.C.’s southern Interior during a more than six-hour flight on Saturday. Data from Flightradar24 indicates that the aircraft spent approximately four hours at 60,000 feet above the Clinton area, where the significant Pear Lake wildfire is active, before heading east over Lake Revelstoke and returning to U.S. airspace.

NASA’s research with the ER-2 focuses on pyrocumulonimbus clouds, described as one of the least comprehended severe weather events on Earth. The B.C. Wildfire Service notes that the Pear Lake wildfire, spanning nearly 1,500 square kilometers and generating extreme smoke and heat, has produced such clouds capable of inducing rain, lightning, and fire tornadoes. The ER-2, a modified Cold War spy plane, renowned for its extreme altitude capabilities, employs state-of-the-art infrared wildfire trackers to collect data on pyrocumulonimbus clouds. NASA emphasizes that monitoring and mapping these hazardous storms in real-time will aid in forecasting them more accurately in the future.