The fires in Australia continue to burn, driving animals from their homes, scorching the landscape, and covering major cities in smoke. Not only are the fires widespread, but powerful enough to create "pyrocumulonimbus" clouds, a thoroughly scary-sounding term.
Intense fires generate smoke, obviously. But their heat can also create a localized updraft powerful enough to create its own changes in the atmosphere above. As the heat and smoke rise, the cloud plume can cool off, generating a large, puffy cloud full of potential rain. The plume can also scatter embers and hot ash over a wider area.
Eventually, water droplets in the cloud condense, generating a downburst of rain — maybe. But the "front" between the calm air outside the fire zone and a pyrocumulonimbus storm cloud is so sharp that it also generates lightning — and that can start new fires.
Read more about the way fires can generate a snowball effect and make things much worse at Insider. -via Digg
(Image credit: Bureau of Meteorology, Victoria)