"Firenado" tears through Palisades Fire zone near Brentwood

Wild footage shows the moments a "firenado" broke out in the midst of the chaos that was the Palisades Fire escalating once again on Friday, moving quickly towards Mandeville Canyon near Brentwood.

Fire tornados, also referred to as fire whirls or fire devils, are typically rare but in extreme instances where a fire is so intense, it can effectively create its own weather system, according to KCAL News Meteorologist Dani Ruberti.

"The heat is so incredibly intense that the air starts to rise and it starts to pull in the surrounding air ... kind of creating that spinning vortex," she said. "The particles in there, they're moving faster than on the outside, and that's what causes the air to spin faster and give that look of a tornado."

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, when smoke from the fire rises and condenses upon reaching the upper atmosphere, that water combines with moisture already in the atmosphere and additional water evaporated from plants burned by the fire. It then creates a cloud called a pyrocumulus, or "fire cloud."

Sometimes a fire tornado can reach hundreds of feet into the air, but only last for a few minutes at a time, Ruberti noted.

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

The blaze has consumed nearly 24,000 acres as of Saturday evening and could continue to grow as another Santa Ana wind event hits Los Angeles County over the weekend and lasts early into next week.

In late-2024, Southern California was also impacted by a different series of devastating wildfires. In that instance, one of the infernos was so intense that the weather system it created brought rain, hail, lightning and extreme winds to the region.