A video emerged Tuesday of a fire tornado swirling over a Canadian lake.
The fire tornado originated from a cold front passing through Canada’s westernmost province of British Columbia, the British Columbia Wildfire Service said in a series of posts on Twitter. As the cold air advanced over Gun Lake, strong southwesterly winds whipped up the already raging wildfires, and humidity and dew point dropped precipitously.
“As shown in the video, the combination of high fire intensity, strong winds and air mass instability resulted in the formation of a fire whirl (otherwise known as a fire tornado) over Gun Lake. Fire whirls are vertically oriented, intensely rotating columns of gas and flame,” the BC Wildfire Service noted.
Complex terrain, downslope winds and the passing cold front also enhanced the atmosphere’s tendency to spin, contributing to the formation of the fire tornado, the Wildfire Service reported. (RELATED: News Censorship On Social Media Is Endangering Wildfire Evacuees)
Last week, a cold front passed through the province following several days of hot, dry weather. pic.twitter.com/fHbPsizjbr
— BC Wildfire Service (@BCGovFireInfo) August 22, 2023
Ground personnel working through the night to fight wildfires burning around the nearby Downton Lake captured the “incredibly rare phenomenon” on Gun Lake early August 17, per the Wildfire Service.
Nearly 400 fires are burning across British Columbia, which has lost about 1.73 million hectares of land to 1,866 wildfires since April 1, the BC Wildfire Service said in a statement.
Canada has been fighting a series of wildfires since late spring so intense that they affected air quality across various U.S. states. The fires in Quebec were due to lightning, those in Alberta were of an unknown cause, while some other fires were started by various human causes such as discarded cigarette butts and sparks flying from train wheels, CBS News reported.