"Larry Pardue" wrote in message
...
Greetings:

Last week, around Wednesday, there was a large grass fire west of
Portales,
New Mexico, USA. The wind was around 45 knots and it was warm.

Albuquerque television station KOB aired some video tape of the fire that
I
found astounding. They showed two, what I would call, fire-devils. The
fire-devils were moving at near the speed of the wind and were rotating
rapidly and in fact looked just like dust-devils made of fire. I did not
record the early footage but was able to get some later that did not show
as
much of the incident.

In my first capture

http://n5lp.net/Floyd1.JPG

the first fire-devil has just hit the highway, where it stalled a bit.
This
one was shorter and broader than the following one.

http://n5lp.net/Floyd2.JPG

Both of them crossed the highway. It looked like it would have been
pretty
interesting from the viewpoint of one of the cars.

These two picture frames are on the order of one second apart in real
time.

I have never heard of this phenomenon before. Is there another term for
it?

Larry Pardue 2I



They would be familiar to people watching Southern California brush fires.
Incendiary bombing raids in WWII produced fire tornadoes that ripped
buildings apart making them burn even faster. They called them
'Firestorms'.

Hijacking this thread a bit, there is an interesting thread on Dr. Jack's
forum about thermal rotation. A thought is that our flight computers might
be able to detect thermal rotation and then suggest a turn direction to
maximize climb.

Bill Daniels