Video shows possible fire tornado amid California wildfires

A swirling cloud of smoke caught on camera as California’s Park Fire erupted Thursday looked exactly like a tornado. But scientists are investigating whether it was a rare fire tornado or just a striking example of the extreme fire behavior they’re increasingly seeing.

The massive, spinning column passed a live remote camera in the mountains northeast of Chico, California, and quickly caught the attention of a group of weather and fire scientists on social media.

“Wildfire plumes rotate, especially the plumes that grow fairly quickly and the plumes that are very intense,” said Nick Nauslar, fire weather science and operations officer for the Storm Prediction Center, based at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. “But we don’t always get the really strong rotation.”

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The swirling column of smoke seen in the video is not the fire tornado, Nauslar said. In this case, scientists think there could have been a fire tornado inside the swirling column, similar to the way regular tornadoes can be camouflaged by intense rainfall wrapped around them.

According to Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, all the ingredients for a fire tornado were there.

In addition to the stunning video, scientists are looking at radar and remote sensing data, which provide even stronger evidence of a possible fire tornado with high winds, Swain said. Reports from firefighters in the area of ”strong winds from multiple directions at the same time” are further evidence, he said. He called it a “strikingly clear indication of a potential ‘pyrovortex’ of tornado strength.”

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If you look closely at the video, you can see two rotating vortices, one spinning clockwise and the other counterclockwise. That’s a behavior seen in strong updrafts or fire plumes from other fires that have produced fire tornadoes, such as the Carr Fire in Northern California in 2018, Nauslar said.

Rotating columns also produce smaller rotating vortices in front of the plume, and those can be seen in the video, he said. The fire follows the heat, and the plume moves with it.

The Park Fire’s intensity has been demonstrated by its shocking and rapid spread. The blaze started on Wednesday afternoon and had grown to more than 348,000 acres by early Saturday morning. It comes amid weeks of record temperatures and is taking advantage of dried grass and other vegetation and hilly terrain.

What is a fire tornado?

This can be confusing, as many people use different terms interchangeably to describe the large and small vortices that occur in and around wildfires.

The rare fire tornadoes studied by fire experts and meteorologists are large, high-wind swirls that form when the swirling smoke plume of an intense wildfire collides with the heat below and the environment around it, Swain said.

The more technical term is fire-generated tornado vortices, but they are also called pyrotornadoes, Nauslar said.

Both Nauslar and Swain said the video shows classic fire behavior that leads to thunderstorm-like clouds, called pyrocumulonimbus clouds, as plumes build up in the atmosphere.

“If you think of a large fire plume, it can often develop into a pyrocumulonimbus,” Nauslar said, “essentially a fire thunderstorm, a deep convective cloud that is created by large, intense wildfires.”

Scientists have long known that fires create their own weather because of the intense heat they generate.

According to the Royal Meteorological Society in the UK, severe bushfires can reach temperatures of up to 1,400 degrees.

What are fire whirls?

Fire whirls are small, swirling flames or smoke tendrils that appear around the edges of fires. Almost every firefighter has encountered them, Swain said. They can be 20 to 30 feet high and last from a few seconds to perhaps a minute.

“They look like tornadoes, but they’re not. Even a house fire or a campfire can create small tornadoes,” he said. “They can still be problematic, but they’re not hugely consequential.”

A fire tornado can be compared to a powerful fire whirl.

Have there been any more fire tornadoes?

Yes.

Are fire tornadoes common?

Scientists aren’t sure.

According to Swain, one of the reasons why these types of events seem to be happening more often is the number of people walking around with cameras on their phones.

The camera that captured Thursday’s event is operated by the ALERTCalifornia network, which is affiliated with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California. The network’s proliferation of live cameras is giving researchers an unprecedented look at this summer’s wildfire activity.

Because fire tornadoes are so rare, scientists don’t have enough data to say how they have changed over time.

But it’s likely they’re increasing, since several recent studies have provided direct evidence that fires are getting more intense, Swain said. “You tend to see these exotic events during more intense fires.”

“Large and potentially dangerous pyrocumulonimbus events are becoming more common,” Swain said.

How could the fire tornado be confirmed?

Normally, the National Weather Service confirms tornadoes by examining wind damage. If there was damage in the path of the plume on Thursday that wasn’t burned away by the fire, the weather service could confirm a fire tornado. So far, the weather service’s Sacramento field office has not received any reports of wind damage at the active fire site, meteorologist Dakari Anderson said.

It’s possible some firefighters saw the fire tornado, but so far they’ve all been pretty busy, Swain said.

Even if no one confirms a fire tornado, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one, Swain said. “It’s kind of like a tree falling in the forest. If no one was there to see it happen, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

Contributor: Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY

Dinah Voyles Pulver is a climate change and environment writer for USA TODAY. She has covered wildfires since the Florida firestorm of 1998. Reach her at [email protected] or @dinahvp.