Puffy, white convective clouds popped up in the hills around Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, and San Diego throughout the afternoon of September 9, 2024.
Puffy, white convective clouds popped up in the hills around Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, and San Diego throughout the afternoon of September 9, 2024. Three of them were different than the others, with their convection fueled, in part, by surface heat associated with intense wildland fires.
Known among meteorologists as pyrocumulus or flammagenitus—or sometimes just “fire clouds”—these tall, billowing features typically have a column of smoke at their base and powerful updrafts that channel large amounts of smoke high into the atmosphere. As the convective plume rises, water vapor condenses around small particles to form cloud droplets and eventually visible clouds at the top of the smoke plume.
That’s what was beginning to happen when the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured these images of a pyrocumulus rising from the Line fire in Southern California. The image includes observations of shortwave-infrared light (red) to highlight the locations of active fires. A faint line of pink fire retardant is also visible on the hills near Redlands.
Read more at NASA Earth Observatory
Image: NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
