California firestorm
The exceptionally dry conditions in California this year are causing unusual wildfire behavior. Not just more fires, you understand, and not just bigger or more intense fires: we're talking about unique fire dynamics. There is a certain unusual fire behavior called a "vertical rotating plume".
That's jargon for "burning funnel cloud".
Check out this video clip from the Indians fire here in Los Padres forest. http://gacc.nifc.gov/oncc/predictive/fuels_fire-danger/LP_FIRE_BEHAVIOR_08.wmv If you aren't accustomed to looking at wildfire images it may not be immediately obvious what you're seeing, but keep watching and listening, and after the voice-over gets through some technical jargon about moisture indexing and stuff like that, he will switch to plain English and it starts to become clear what's going on: A fire plume so intense that it has taken on the characteristics of an F-1 tornado.
You sometimes hear newspeople glibly mention that "the such-and-such fire is burning hot enough to generate its own weather effects..." but they don't usually explain what this means. Usually it just means that heat intensity in the core of the fire causes air from surrounding areas to be sucked inward, generating winds. But sometimes it means that the fire is itself literally becoming a storm system.