Wildfires are becoming increasingly frequent and intense in a warming climate, reversing decades of air quality improvements, as seen in the 2025 Los Angeles Fires and many other record-breaking events worldwide. Crucially, what burns locally doesn’t stay local—wildfire smoke often rises, travels, and affects the atmosphere and climate far beyond its source. I will share new insights into the far-reaching impacts of wildfire smoke based on aircraft measurements, satellite observations, and modeling. At the regional scale, I will present first-of-its-kind aircraft sampling of wildfire smoke at ~14.5 km altitude, revealing unexpectedly large aerosol particles that enhance outgoing radiation by ~35%, challenging conventional model assumptions. Next, I will show how high-altitude wildfire smoke perturbs Earth’s energy balance and global temperatures, with the 2019/20 Australian wildfires leaving detectable climate fingerprints in the atmosphere comparable to major volcanic eruptions, and causing the strongest stratospheric warming of this century. I will conclude with future perspectives on bridging measurements and modeling to advance understanding of aerosol-chemistry-climate interactions in a world increasingly shaped by wildfires and shifting anthropogenic emissions.
The Physics Frontiers Centers (PFC) program supports university-based centers and institutes where the collective efforts of a larger group of individuals can enable transformational advances in the most promising research areas. The program is designed to foster major breakthroughs at the intellectual frontiers of physics by providing needed resources such as combinations of talents, skills, disciplines, and/or specialized infrastructure, not usually available to individual investigators or small groups, in an environment in which the collective efforts of the larger group can be shown to be seminal to promoting significant progress in the science and the education of students. PFCs also include creative, substantive activities aimed at enhancing education, broadening participation of traditionally underrepresented groups, and outreach to the scientific community and general public.