What's worse than a wall of fire? How about a whirling spiral of fire? In California, amid deadly wildfires, high winds have kicked up the rare phenomenon that is a firenado.
You can check out the video below, which showed high winds causing the fire swirl. In an interview with the New York Post, Fox Weather meteorologist Cody Braud said "a spin at the ground level as winds start to converge together" caused the firenado.
Technically not a tornado as it doesn't form from the clouds, the weather phenomenon is terrifying and awe-inspiring all at once. Fortunately, no one got injured by the fire swirl. But it just shows how scary nature can be a times.
"This one in particular was very picturesque and was in an area where people could actually see it," Braud said. "Sometimes it's hard to capture them because sometimes they spin well into the fire."
Firenado Causes
Braud speculates that there might have been more than one firenado amid all of the wildfires in the state at the moment. In fact, as I'll get to below, wildfires are the perfect storm to creat these rare events. The weatherman pointed out that this one was pretty small.
"They can get extremely big, sometimes as wide as several hundreds of feet," he said. "This one looked like tens of feet, if that. These super intense fires are obviously generating a lot of heat, and the hotter it is, the quicker air rises, because heat naturally rises. You get a little bit of wind mixed in with that, you get these isolated instances of a firenado."
Loretta Mickley, Senior research fellow at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, told Harvard Gazette that the reason they're rare is because you need the right circumstances.
She said, "It is a spiraling vortex of gases and smoke and fire. They're rare, because you need a lot of buoyancy from heating of the air by very hot gases coming off the fire. The buoyancy will give the atmosphere instability, but instability alone is not enough to create a fire tornado. You also need a stack of winds shifting in speed or direction with height. We call this wind shear, and the wind shear together with the intense heat could generate a fire tornado, which, by the way, sounds horrible."
