Images and stories from 2018 and 2019 fires in California introduced Americans to terms like “fire tornado” and “pyrocumulonimbus.” Now the fires in Australia, which have already burned an area many times greater than the worst year in California in just the last two months, are taking fire-created weather to the next level.
As Reuters reports, the widespread fires are bringing their own fire-driven weather systems, including fire-thunderstorms that don’t produce rain, but do produce abundant dry lightning. That lightning in turn sparks more fires. These storms help spread the fire more quickly, generate new fires from both lightning and widely distributed embers, and produce unpredictable winds that make fighting the fires much more dangerous.
And if some of the fire tornadoes pictured in U.S. fires have seemed more akin to dust devils than to anything that would be measured on the Fujita scale, that is absolutely not the case for a storm that killed a firefighter on Monday. As a soaring pyrocumulonimbus cloud collapsed, it generated a tightening spiral, ultimately forming a fire tornado powerful enough to flip a ten ton fire truck.
Across Australia on Saturday, the fire storms were also being assisted by the return of record temperatures and high winds as evacuations continued and hundreds of more homes were destroyed. Meanwhile, as The New York Times reports, Australia’s leaders seem intent on committing “climate suicide,” as they refuse to either accept responsibility or take action to prevent a repeat of the devastation.
Australia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe. Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world-heritage rain forests are burning, its giant kelp forests have largely vanished, numerous towns have run out of water or are about to, and now the vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen.
Australia’s fire seas has barely begun.