What's more current than the weather?

[BigV]

Still shirt sleeve weather here, but we did get some rain, enough to justify turning the wipers on. The first in about three months. Very, very, very dry summer here.

[Trilby]

Originally Posted by BigV

Still shirt sleeve weather here, but we did get some rain, enough to justify turning the wipers on. The first in about three months. Very, very, very dry summer here.

Did the drought effect the Starbucks crop very much?

[BigV]

...

I do sometimes drink Starbucks, but for the most part, I grind and brew my own coffee. And I'm a four-season coffee drinker. Sometimes I get an iced coffee when it's really hot. It wasn't especially hot this summer, just arid. Parched. Dessicated. Mummified. Dried. De-watered. Dusty. Water, Water, nary-where and barely a drop to drink.

Which explains the coffee.

[Trilby]

The only thing I like at Starbucks is the salted caramel latte.

And this one kind of berry iced-tea...it's really good, too. but I'm not usually willing to pay five bucks for a cup of coffee. I only go there maybe three times a year.

[ZenGum]

We're moving well into spring now, so in the Outback (Thargomindah, Qld in particular) the forecast is for hot dry weather, smoke haze, strong winds, with a chance of fire elementals in the 4 to 6 hit dice range.



Okay technically that's a piddly little tornado (note the outdoor toilet or "dunny" on the right for scale) which is sucking up a pre-existing bushfire. I've seen things like this in bushfire footage fairly often. Without the fire we'd call it a willy-willy. With the fire, I don't know if it has a common name. Fire tornado? Firenado? Firespout? Fire devil? Firewilly?

[glatt]

willy willy, huh? We'd probably call that a dust devil.

Don't think we have a name for it when it's sucking on a fire.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

We're moving well into spring now, so in the Outback (Thargomindah, Qld in particular) the forecast is for hot dry weather, smoke haze, strong winds, with a chance of fire elementals in the 4 to 6 hit dice range.

Attachment 41351

Okay technically that's a piddly little tornado (note the outdoor toilet or "dunny" on the right for scale) which is sucking up a pre-existing bushfire. I've seen things like this in bushfire footage fairly often. Without the fire we'd call it a willy-willy. With the fire, I don't know if it has a common name. Fire tornado? Firenado? Firespout? Fire devil? Firewilly?

first of all, that is a great picture! very dramatic.

Originally Posted by glatt

willy willy, huh? We'd probably call that a dust devil.

Don't think we have a name for it when it's sucking on a fire.

"sucking on a fire"... I see atmospheric phenomena like this from time to time, (never on fire though) and I always think about where and how the flow is moving. this is how I see it and understand it.

When you take a bath, and you pull the plug from the drain, the water swirls and forms a cone, right? same thing's happening in a tornado or a hurricane or a firewilly. In the bath, there's a layer of heavy dense water above a layer of light less dense air. In their struggle to swap positions, the water swirls downward and leaves a tube through which the air may swirl upward.

That's exactly what we're seeing here. The hot air around the burning ground and brush is less dense than the cooler air layer above and it wants to rise as the cooler air wants to press downward. The easiest way to do this is to swirl and the fiery air can now flow up and away from the pressure of the layer above. Same thing in a tornado. Warm air near the ground, colder stormy air above, when they try to swap, they do so in a swirl, a tornado.

Most times, you can't see the funnel of air, unless there's something in it like dust or in this case, fire. Very cool picture!

[Gravdigr]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

Firewilly?

It's definitely not firewilly.

I had firewilly once. Doc gave me a cream for it.

[ZenGum]

Originally Posted by Gravdigr

It's definitely not firewilly.

I had firewilly once. Doc gave me a cream for it.

Yeah, but you probably didn't need four refills.

[Lamplighter]

Oh to be in Venice...


ABC News
11/12/12

Venice Floods
Venice Floods as Torrential Rain Hits the City

Link above has many pics...

[BigV]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

We're moving well into spring now, so in the Outback (Thargomindah, Qld in particular) the forecast is for hot dry weather, smoke haze, strong winds, with a chance of fire elementals in the 4 to 6 hit dice range.

Attachment 41351

Okay technically that's a piddly little tornado (note the outdoor toilet or "dunny" on the right for scale) which is sucking up a pre-existing bushfire. I've seen things like this in bushfire footage fairly often. Without the fire we'd call it a willy-willy. With the fire, I don't know if it has a common name. Fire tornado? Firenado? Firespout? Fire devil? Firewilly?

Apparently, a local expert, Rick McCrae distinguishes this apparition as a fire whirl, attached to the ground, and not a fire tornado, which would be attached to the underside of a thundercloud.

[infinite monkey]

Fire fag?

[Big Sarge]

Minus the fire, we call them "Dust Devils". With the fire, I think we call them, "Oh-Shit!!!!!".

[Trilby]

cold but gonna be sunny so put on a happy face.

[ZenGum]

I just came here to post the ABC's story on that.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-1...ornado/4380252

I was in Canberra when that fire happened. I was living in a student residence on campus. I stepped out of my room to go shopping late morning, and noticed half the sky was BLACK from smoke, which was drifting kinda in our direction.

It occurred to me that (a) I was the chief fire warden of the college, (b) although we had a plan for a fire in the building, we didn't have a bushfire plan, (c) between the fire and our location was a big mountain covered in bush that hadn't been burned for twenty years, and there are more trees on campus than students. Uuh-ohh.

Luckily, I grew up pretty bushfire-savvy, so I spent the next three hours puling a bushfire plan out of my ear, got all the 36 hoses set up to cover the whole building, planned command structure, recruited volunteer firecrew from the residents, and everything. Later, the uni fire safety officer approved all this and it became the college's bushfire plan.

Even luckier, the fire stayed to the south west and didn't get within 10 km of us, but we were getting burned leaves drifting out of the sky. They had cooled enough to not start any spot fires, but it was an uncomfortable evening.

Our office manager's house was under direct attack. They lost the garden but saved the building. She never came back to work, that I knew of.

Nature can be a real mo-fo sometimes.