This is an interesting video of a fire vortex that has been making the rounds on the web. I’ve seen this phenomenon before in wildfires here in California, but this one is rather dramatic in color, intensity, and longevity. It’s worth a look. Don’t be surprised if we see a “global warming increases the frequency of fire tornados” sometime in the future.
In regards to the issue of seeing more “wild weather phenomena” lately in the news, I’ll point out that the expansion of cheap high quality cameras has made the reporting frequency increase thanks to millions of ordinary citizens being armed with them.
That shouldn’t be confused with a statistical increase of occurrence. For example, one could argue that with more cameras afoot in the field, we’d see more UFO and bigfoot sitings, but the truth is that these have not increased like weather sitings have.
In this video from AP, that also has the “Tornado of Fire”, note the stopped line of cars.
How many photos and videos of this event were taken by people that had cameras? I’m guessing a lot.
Here’s another one just this week:
and another in 2008…
In fact if you search YouTube you’ll find dozens…ten years ago could we have seen these? If one looks at the frequency of “fire tornados” in the last few years it would be easy to conclude they are a rising trend, more extreme weather due to global warming fodder for people like Joe Romm.
But the fact is that the frequency of reporting and sharing has increased.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Last summer in Aus, in terms of fire, was a non-event. Compared to “Black Saturday” the year before and the town which suffered most, was it due to global warming? No. I was due to stupid council policy and a faulty powerline.
This summer, I’d reckon, will be a cool one (No flys again! Yay!).
“… conducted research into the accuracy of newsprint, and found that about 50% of 1,220 news stories contained errors.”
And the other 50%, of course, were just plain wrong.
On another but related note…. a tired saw that will not die!
http://www.torontosun.com/news/columnists/thane_burnett/2010/08/25/15138306.html
With the drought in Russia that saw 54 people die in forest fires — here in Canada, air tanker pilots Tim Whiting of Langley, B.C., and Brian Tilley of Edmonton, Alb., were killed last month battling B.C. fires in parched conditions — Stocks has little doubt climate change is impacting global wildfires.
That may lead to, over the next fifty years, an increase in both the frequency and severity of fires across Canada.
“The resources we have will only go so far,” Stocks explains.
…
“My personal opinion is an assumption,” Johann Goldammer, director of The Global Fire Monitoring Center in Germany tells QMI Agency in an email exchange.
“Climate change coupled with anthropogenic impacts…will aggravate the situation and result in more frequent occurrences and severity of wildfire activity globally.”
So there is your answer to what is happening in Brazil! Here come the fire tornadoes…DUCK!
Gerald Machnee says: August 27, 2010 at 8:29 pm
Rotation on the Hawaii one appears to be clockwise. I cannot tell which way the Brazil one is rotating.
Northern hemisphere tornadoes rotate counterclockwise, opposite the direction of the Hawaiian video.
Southern hemisphere tornadoes rotate clockwise, but the Brazilian one is rotating counterclockwise. Araçatuba is 21°S, so it, too, is rotating the ‘wrong’ direction.
Coriolis effect over small areas and short time spans is far too weak to set rotation direction for fire tornadoes (and bathtub drains). The direction for these is set by whichever turbulent swirl is present when the updraft is strong enough to self sustain.
>>But the fact is that the frequency of reporting and sharing has increased.
And there is a camera on every mobile telephone.
“But the fact is that the frequency of reporting and sharing has increased. ”
No different than the opening of the NWP.
Before radar, GPS, satellites, who was stupid enough to go up there and look?
Then once they got there, who was stupid enough to try and make it through?
Not many….It was a total crap shoot.
B.C. said August 28, 2010 at 5:50 am: “In my line of work (prescribed burning & wildland fire fighting), fire whirls are actually quite a common occurrence.”
B.C., if you could take a look at my comments above at 3:35 am, would you be so kind as to briefly explain the difference between “fire whirls” (others above also have used that or a similar term) and what Maclean calls a “blowup” in “Young Men and Fire.”
Are these basically the same thing? Is the “fire whirl” or “fire tornado” simply an instance of the “blowup?”
It’s been a while since I read “Young Men and Fire” and since I personally visited Mann Gulch in Montana, but if anything the conflagration that Maclean described was more of a “fire hurricane” than a “fire whirl.” I would imagine it looked something like the videos shown above, but a great deal more terrifying.
Not to mention cameras and videos built into cellphones as well as more videos in police cars, cheap hand held video cameras, CCTV run amok etc. The same issue of technology applies to hurricane detection compared to 100 years ago.
How many people had cheap digital mobile phones with cameras and videos in the 1960s or 1970s?
In fact if someone said in the 1960s or 1970s cameras and videos, built into cellphones, would soon become commonplace they would be laughed at. (I’m sure someone predicted it though).
Talking of the spread of mobile phones (many coming ready shipped with cameras and videos) see Africa. The reporting of ‘unusaual’ weather events will only grow, but it will be trupeted as a sign of CAGW. There is also the issue of instant images. People can simpy upload photos and movies straight onto the net or email it to the MSM. The BBC in fact encourages this for certain news stories.
Typo:
“…..will be [trumpeted] as a sign of CAGW.”
Douglas Dc says:
August 27, 2010 at 8:23 pm
REPLY: I expect you’d see a lot of them, and how many of them were you able to share with the world on video? -Anthony
No video,too busy trying to keep flying. 😉
With regards to the above posts “Storm King Mountain” as a close to Mann Gulch in
modern times as it got. The Redmond, Or. Hotshots and Missoula smoke jumpers lost
on 7/6/94 I knew most of them from my years at Redmond and Missoula Tanker bases. It too was a “Fire Hurricane.” The best description possible..
Douglas DC: “Storm King Mountain” as a close to Mann Gulch in modern times as it got.”
I had the privilege in summer 1994 to hike up to Mann Gulch with a copy of “Young Men and Fire” in my backpack, which I was reading at the time. I stayed there all day, absorbing the events and going up and down through the gulch, trying to understand what Norman Maclean was describing. It was a humbling experience, seeing the crosses and imagining what those boys went through.
Obviously these kinds of fires have nothing to do with “climate change,” and for the delusional AGW cultists to say so is both pathetic and extremely annoying.
Via your comments, Douglas DC, I have just discovered that Norman Maclean’s son John Norman Maclean – who edited “Young Men and Fire” – also wrote a book about Storm King called “Fire on the Mountain” which I have just put on my September reading list. I don’t know how I missed that.
Anthony is correct about the number being “reported” versus the number that actually are. Still, for many of us not in the line of work that would expose us to them, they are fascinating. The first “fire tornado” I recall seeing was a Hollywood special effect in The Ten Commandments. I now wonder if de Mille got his idea from seeing one in reality.
Had you been at a safe distance from Dresden, Germany, on the night of February 13th, 1945, you’d seen perhaps the biggest firestorm of them all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
So, what’s strange with convenction currents formed when there is enough heat around?
How soon we forget; do we all not remember the full-size VHS format camcorders? Or it’s cousin, the little VHS-C format? (I still have a functioning camcorder, although I seldom use it for more than it’s optics to NTSC format these days …)
Or, how America’s Funniest Home Videos gives an address that (gasp) -tapes- could be sent to?
Ref – VHS format, timeline – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS
.
Are you kidding? Any metropolitan area had at most about 18 frequencies spread across two or three frequency bands (Low-VHF, High-VHF, UHF) as part of the MTS or IMTS and RCC (Radio Common Carrier) services for the use by _millions_ of people. There were waiting lists (measured in years) in most metropolitan to get ‘mobile’ service!
The ‘mobile phones’ in the 60’s period had tube-type RF PA (Radio Frequency power amplifie) stages! The phones in the 70’s were not that much better; we’re still talking equipment mounted permanently in the car (exc in a few rare cases).
Some history (since I grew up and studied these ‘services’):
Improved Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS) subscriber equipment:
http://www.privateline.com/PCS/mobilephonepictures.htm
Technical oveview, MTS, IMTS, RCC (Radio Common Carrier) service:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improved_Mobile_Telephone_Service
.
When I was living in Bolivia’s Amazon jungle 300 km north of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, back in 1996, we had one of the worst jungle fires remembered in the region. The dry season begins around April 16th every year and lasts until September 25th, with not a single drop of rain in that period. The underbrush becomes dry as paper. What’s worse, palm trees known as “cusi” and “motacú” have leaves that, when dry, are as flammable as kerosene. Actually, people use them for starting fires when there is no paper of liquid fuels available.
Indians and settlers use motacú leaves for thatching their roofs and making walls weaving the leaves. If a house catches fire it will disappear in a firestorm in no more than 1 minute, a quite very common accident. They will build a new shack in two days, with the help of their neighbors.
On August 15th, the fire almost burnt down the entire ‘Guarayo’ indian village of Urubichá, where I was living. And by December the entire region had blossomed again when the rainy season returned on Septemeber 25th, as a Swiss watch. Jungles have an astounding capacity of recovery, and ashes from the fires are an excellent fertilizer in a lateritic clay soil normally deprived of nutritents lixiviated by rains. It has been that way since eons ago.
_Jim, I was referring to video recording ability in everyone’s pocket… I’ve had a camcorder since 1984 (not likely to forget about that – lol).
A few weeks back there was a car crash on a local street. There were probably 100 people there, I would say MOST of them had their cell phones out taking pictures. In the “old days” you would have had to bring a camera.
Garry says:
August 28, 2010 at 11:28 am
“Via your comments, Douglas DC, I have just discovered that Norman Maclean’s son John Norman Maclean – who edited “Young Men and Fire” – also wrote a book about Storm King called “Fire on the Mountain” which I have just put on my September reading list. I don’t know how I missed that.”
Read “Young men and Fire “that year in Prescott Az., then we get sent to Grand Junction . We got sent back to Redmond,Or. the day before that happened. Always felt a bit guilty about not being able to help, but, you could’ve had every Airtanker and
Helicopter in the country there, and I doubt if it would’ve done any good. One of the
Redmond Hotshots that survived was the son of an old friend. his testimony put that
guilt to rest…
Fire … major … event …
‘car crash on a local street’ – not so much. (Unless it’s a really, really big crash!)
Big events draw out the cameras and video equipment … I used to pack my Canon AE-1 (w/telephoto lens) in my briefcase prepared for any event at any time … now of course it’s more like a Canon S3 IS (which does pretty good audio and video too).
There is also a contingent out there who (used to) constantly monitor the PD (and FD) frequencies … maybe working the local ‘beat’ for stories or freelance, prepared with camera and video gear given the advent of affordable consumer-grade VHS that didn’t require two men and a boy to transport and operate …
What we lacked was autonomous distribution of said material; the internet has provided that, no longer requiring distributing ‘gatekeepers’ like the local TV station (‘film at eleven’) or national networks and their programming (FHV et al) to put material before the public’s eyeballs.
.
Mike McMillan says:
August 28, 2010 at 7:09 am
Gerald Machnee says: August 27, 2010 at 8:29 pm
Rotation on the Hawaii one appears to be clockwise. I cannot tell which way the Brazil one is rotating.
Northern hemisphere tornadoes rotate counterclockwise, opposite the direction of the Hawaiian video.
Southern hemisphere tornadoes rotate clockwise, but the Brazilian one is rotating counterclockwise. Araçatuba is 21°S, so it, too, is rotating the ‘wrong’ direction.
Coriolis effect over small areas and short time spans is far too weak to set rotation direction for fire tornadoes (and bathtub drains). The direction for these is set by whichever turbulent swirl is present when the updraft is strong enough to self sustain.
===============================
There are a small percentage of tornados (real tornados) that rotate in an anticyclonic fashion.
http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=B6QTLMj2Fe0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticyclonic_tornado
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Mike and BC are quite correct. I was part of the extreme fire behavior cadre of instructors. Fire whirls (like dust devils behind a large truck) occur regularly when wind travels around a large enough obstruction to impart rotation.
please try to stop killing innocent people with your bloody machines allah will b mercy on u other wise it will get worst and worst so you people will burn in this world and also in hell ….
Hello I am writting from Georgia to share my idea
I think that my idea against Tornadoes is realistic and easy to realize, it is basicaly depended on several simply things
So I want to share my ideas to competent persons and organizations .
We are wxpecting your support as well
(I can stop TORNADO )
Thanks.
B.R
Vasili Pavlovski
6/5 Gunia Str. Tbilisi. Georgia
(+995) 99-301-408