It started as a wildfire. Then it made its own thunderstorm. Then...a tornado!

This photo provided by Katelynn & Jordan Hewlett

In August 2020, California was deep in wildfire season. Flames had already swallowed thousands of acres across the state, filling the skies with smoke and stretching firefighters to their limit. But on one afternoon near the California-Nevada border, a wildfire did something even the pros had never seen.

The fire built a thunderstorm.

And then that thunderstorm created a tornado.

Yes, an actual tornado formed inside a fire-driven thunderstorm. The event unfolded over the Loyalton Fire near Sierra County, and it marked the first time in U.S. history that the National Weather Service issued a Tornado Warning for a wildfire.

This was not a radar glitch. It was not a guess. It was one of the most extreme examples of atmosphere and earth colliding, all at once.

Fire that climbs

To understand how a wildfire creates a storm, you have to imagine what a fire really is, not just heat, but an engine. The Loyalton Fire, like many massive wildfires, generated intense upward motion as hot air, smoke, ash, and burning debris surged into the sky.

That vertical motion acts just like the warm surface air in a summertime thunderstorm. The higher it climbs, the more it cools. Moisture in the column condenses, forming a dark, ominous cloud known as a pyrocumulonimbus.

That word sounds made up, but it is very real. It means a fire cloud that reaches into the atmosphere like a rocket. These clouds can rise up to ten miles high. That is the cruising altitude of commercial jets.

From the ground, they look like volcanic eruptions with mushroom-shaped plumes. From space, they are massive anvils floating above burning forests. They do not just look like thunderstorms, they are thunderstorms. And sometimes, if conditions are right, they begin to rotate.

That is when things get dangerous.

The birth of a fire tornado

As the Loyalton Fire intensified, radar imagery began to show rotation within the cloud. It was not a small swirl. It was strong enough to trigger a warning that had never been issued before, a tornado warning, driven not by a cold front or a squall line, but by fire.

Chasers near the blaze captured video of a massive rotating column of smoke and flame. Trees snapped. Flames spiraled upward. The entire fire seemed to lift off the ground and spin like a giant flaming drill bit.

After the storm passed and the evidence was reviewed, the National Weather Service confirmed what had occurred. This was not just fire behavior. This was a tornado. It was rated an EF1, with winds reaching between 86 and 110 miles per hour.

That is the same rating as many classic Midwest tornadoes, but it came wrapped in smoke and born from a wildfire.

It did not end there

The pyrocumulonimbus cloud over the Loyalton Fire did more than spin. It began to create its own lightning, launching bolts into the surrounding landscape. These were not wet lightning bolts. They were dry, meaning they carried electrical charge, but no rain.

In other words, the storm that the fire created was now starting new fires.

Let that sink in for a moment. A wildfire grew so strong that it created a thunderstorm. That thunderstorm then produced lightning. That lightning went on to ignite new fires.

It was a feedback loop from atmospheric hell.

The science is still catching up

Meteorologists have studied tornadoes and thunderstorms for decades. But fire-driven weather is still a frontier. Pyrocumulonimbus clouds behave like supercells but are triggered from below, not above. They form in unstable conditions but feed off flame instead of cold fronts.

As climate trends continue to dry out forests and supercharge fire seasons, experts worry that events like this may become more frequent. It is not just about the fires we can see. It is about the weather they can create.

And weather that behaves like this cannot be ignored.

Why this belongs in Weather Gone Wild

Because nature is not supposed to do this.

Fires are supposed to burn low and spread outward. Thunderstorms are supposed to form in the sky, not on the ground. Tornadoes are supposed to come from supercells, not smoke plumes.

But sometimes, the atmosphere decides to rewrite its own rules. The Loyalton Fire was a reminder that we are not just observers of the weather. We are part of its story.

This was not a fluke. It was a preview.

A wildfire built a storm. The storm created lightning. And somewhere in the middle of it all, a tornado was born.

That is not just wild.That is Weather Nerdy.