Atlantis Online
March 29, 2024, 01:26:23 am
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: USA showered by a watery comet ~11,000 years ago, ending the Golden Age of man in America
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20050926/mammoth_02.html
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links Staff List Calendar Login Register  

Fire Tornado Seen Spinning Over Hungary

Pages: [1]   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: Fire Tornado Seen Spinning Over Hungary  (Read 100 times)
0 Members and 10 Guests are viewing this topic.
Dr. Manhattan
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 2132



« on: March 06, 2011, 05:26:58 pm »

Fire Tornado Seen Spinning Over Hungary

Photograph by Viktor Veres, Blikk/Reuters

National Geographic News

Published March 4, 2011

A fire tornado whirled above a burning plastic-processing plant during a huge conflagration outside Budapest, Hungary, on Tuesday night (pictured). (Related: "Fire-Tornado Pictures: Why They Form, How to Fight Them.")
Report Spam   Logged

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter

Dr. Manhattan
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 2132



« Reply #1 on: March 06, 2011, 05:27:57 pm »

The cause of the fire remains unknown, and no casualties were reported, according to the Reuters news service.

Also known as fire whirls, fire devils, or even firenados, fire tornadoes form when high heat and turbulent winds together spur whirling eddies of air, mechanical engineer Jason Forthofer told National Geographic News in September.

These eddies can tighten into a tornado-like structure that sucks in burning debris and flammable gases, said Forthofer, of the U.S. Forest Service's Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory in Montana.

The fiery core inside the swirling "tube" of winds is usually about 1 to 3 feet (0.3 to 0.9 meter) wide and five to ten stories tall. At the extreme, though, fire tornadoes can stretch dozens of feet wide and more than a hundred stories tall, Forthofer said. (Related: "Giant 'Tornadoes' Seen Erupting From the Sun.")

The firenadoes, he added, aren't so much rare as rarely reported—perhaps because they tend to occur during wildfires, rather than in urban centers.

Relatively persistent, fire tornadoes can last for an hour or more and can be put out only when their sources—the fires below—are extinguished. (Also see "Wildfire Pictures: Russia Burns, Moscow Chokes.")

In addition to studying how fire whirls form and can best be fought, Forthofer hopes to perfect fire tornado prediction.

"If we can identify conditions that are conducive to fire whirls," he said. "That would be a heads-up for firefighters, because there have been some [people] that have been burned by them."

—With reporting by Ker Than

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/110304-fire-tornado-picture-firenado-science-whirl-devil-budapest-hungary/
Report Spam   Logged
Pages: [1]   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum
Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy