The future may be full of fire tornadoes
An F5 tornado in Oklahoma City, May 3, 1999 (NOAA/)A fire tornado might sound like an unfortunate coincidence involving a weather front and a wildfire, but the truth is actually even wilder. Firenadoes, to use the vernacular, occur when a fire burns so intensely that it creates its own weather.The heat inside a large fire causes air to rise, forming eddies that can spiral into a vortex called a fire whirl. A fire tornado is essentially a much larger whirl. Those rising eddies become strong updrafts, much like the updrafts that form during thunderstorms. In normal storms, the moisture flung into the air from these updrafts form cumulonimbus clouds—when it happens in a fire, they’re called pyrocumulonimbus clouds. But these updrafts alone don’t cause a tornado. It’s when the surrounding winds are changing direction rapidly that the updrafts can start to get redirected into a spiral, which becomes a vortex, which...