Large fires can also create their own thunderstorms. Known as pyro-cumulonimbus, they can cause erratic, more intense and dangerous bushfire behaviour.
Cumulus clouds, for example, get their start when solar energy evaporates water from oceans, plants, and soil by breaking the bonds that hold water molecules together.
There are five primary cloud types: stratus, cumulus, stratocumulus, cumulonimbus and cirrus, each of which are subdivided into different genera based on altitude.
The beauty of Howard's system was that the basic components could be freely recombined to describe every shape and size of passing cloud--stratocumulus, cirrostratus, cumulocongestus, and so on.
Now, let's look at the five most basic, we'll start with cumulus which is a low cloud with a white puffy appearance and most often composed of water droplets.
If this is intense, and it's unrelenting, and it continues to build, That cumulus cloud, which is just white with sunlight moving through it, it becomes less white.
He looked at the sky and saw the white cumulus built like friendly piles of ice cream and high above were the thin feathers of the cirrus against the high September sky.
The last mile of its course lies between the sides of sunken domes and swelling folds of the granite that are clustered and pressed together like a mass of bossy cumulus clouds.