Oregon's wildfire grew so large it created its own weather system. Here's how that can happen.

Oregon's Durkee Fire – the largest active blaze in the U.S. – has burned more than 268,500 acres of land. And while that amount of lost land poses an aggressive and dangerous threat, there's another threat wildfires like Durkee can present that many aren't aware of: they can create their own weather systems.  

"Fires create their own weather, they can get very intense, and they can really impact the weather around them," Craig Clements, of San Jose State University's Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center, told a college radio station in 2022. "It's one of the phenomena that we just don't get enough observations of."

The Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to aviation safety, explains that while the movement and size of fires tend to be the most immediate concerns, sometimes fires can expand in a way where "the dangers multiply and the situation becomes much more complex and less predictable."