Why NASA flew a repurposed Cold War spy plane over B.C.’s wildfires

From CBC News

A high-altitude research aircraft from NASA flew over British Columbia’s wildfires over the weekend in a bid to better understand weather events generated by large blazes.

Online aviation tracking shows the ER-2 plane flew back and forth over B.C.’s southern Interior more than a dozen times on Saturday on a flight of more than six hours that took off from Great Falls, Mont.

Data from the Flightradar24 website shows the plane spent about four hours at an altitude of 60,000 feet over the Clinton area, where the massive Pear Lake wildfire has been burning.