WATCH: Emergency workers on Kangaroo Island used water to soothe a koala burned by the Australian wildfires.
But Australia is not yet in the clear. Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who has faced harsh criticism for not addressing the link between the country’s wildfires and climate change, warned that the fires will continue to burn for months to come. The New South Wales Rural Fire Service reported that there are still 69 uncontained fires in that state alone, many of which remain severe.
“There are places where flames have been 70 meters [230 feet] high, and there’s evidence in some places that temperatures of the fires have been 1,000 degrees [celsius],” said Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climate scientist at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
These “intense and voracious” fires are interacting with the atmosphere and creating their own weather, including lightning, which can cause new wildfires, she added.Fire-driven thunderstorms have been observed before, and typically occur when columns of smoke and heat draw in moisture from the atmosphere and create an enormous pyrocumulonimbus, or “fire cloud.”
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, these dangerous formations can spread fires by driving strong winds, generating lightning and lofting burning fragments — a phenomenon sometimes called an ember attack.that pelted the firetruck with sparks and trapped the emergency crew in a so-called flashover.
Fire clouds also funnel smoke and tiny particles known as aerosols into the lower stratosphere — similar to what happens when a volcano erupts —
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