KUSA — From wildfires to volcanoes, natural disasters have a way of creating their own weather – and it’s pretty cool.
A wildfire in California did something incredible - it created its own mini super cell storm. All the rotating smoke you can see below is a part of a storm called a mesocyclone.
The clouds themselves are called pyrocumulonimbus, which literally translates to fire and thunder clouds. There was even some rain falling but it all evaporated because temperatures inside this storm probably hit 500 degrees.
While intense heating from fires can cause ‘firenadoes’ similar to dust devils, this meets the true definition of tornado: touching both the storm cloud above and the ground, then the water as the storm moves over the river.
Volcanoes in Hawaii tend to create their own weather. When you look closely at the volcanic eruption below, you can see flashes of white – that’s lightning!
Lightning in volcanic eruptions is pretty common in some parts of the world, but rare in Hawaii.
It happens the same way you get lightning in a thunderstorm, but instead of ice particles creating the charge separation, inside the volcanic eruption clouds there are small particles of volcanic material colliding at high speeds, creating that separation of charges and then – lightning.
We've had so many flash flood watches in Colorado over the last couple of week, and the video below is why.
It was taken near the Weston Pass fire, and believe it or not – when it comes to burn scars, we can see flash flooding with as little as a quarter inch of rain.
With all the vegetation freshly burned, the water can't absorb into the ground like it normally would. The result: flash flooding that can come on with very little warning.
