Radar Observations of a Major Industrial Fire

Abstract On 23 May 1996, a Montreal suburban paint factory containing several hundred thousand gallons of paints, solvents, and other chemicals burned to the ground in a spectacular fire. The smoke plume from the fire was readily detected by three radars operated by McGill University for routine observations of the atmosphere. An S-band (10-cm wavelength) scanning radar provided a plan view of the plume from the time of its initial appearance over the plant until the fire was finally extinguished. These data reveal the history of the plume, showing how it meandered and spread as it was advected downwind. The plume passed directly over the site of two vertically pointing radars, one a high-resolution X-band radar (3-cm wavelength) and the other a UHF (33-cm wavelength) wind profiler. Doppler spectra of the smoke echoes in the vertical beam of the profiler indicated predominantly downward velocities, but it was not possible to distinguish in the spectra between scattering by settling particles and scatterin...