If you're in a bushfire, the best thing you could hope for is a cloud, right? It cuts out the heat and promises relief with rain. But did you know that some of the most extreme bushfires are capable of creating pyromaniac clouds that make them that much more ferocious? They’re called pyrocumulonimbus. Nate Byrne explains weird weather.
Some of the most extreme bushfires that Australians have endured, like the Black Saturday fires or the Canberra fires, were made much worse by the weather that these fires created themselves.
A bushfire heats the air around it, and if the fires are really intense and the atmosphere unstable, that air can get very high in the atmosphere: up to 12-15kms or more.
On its way up to those great heights, ice can form and you can get violent winds, thunder and lightning.
And when that happens, the cloud evolves into a type of cloud called a pyrocumulonimbus.
When this pyromaniac cloud really heats up, that's when it gets some powerfully destructive super powers.
They have the ability to hurl burning embers up to 30km away, or to strike lightning 100km downstream from the fire front. That can create even more bushfires.
One of the most terrifying super powers of these pyromaniac clouds can get is the ability to make tornadoes.
When you get a tornado and fire, two of nature's most terrifying things, you get a tornado made of fire.
One of the most destructive fire tornados we know about was during the 2003 Canberra fires.
Four lives were lost and more than 500 homes were destroyed.
Residents … came home and they found cars flipped and trees ripped out of the ground and thrown kilometres away.
About Weird Weather
Weird Weather is a five part series made in collaboration with the Bureau of Meteorology. From pyromaniac clouds to space weather storms, ABC weather guru Nate Byrne explains weird weather phenomena.
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