 Since the beginning of humankind, if we wanted to see what the weather was doing, we'd simply step outside, take a look around, maybe, put a finger to the wind. Well, they do that and a whole lot more out here, but there is one particular piece of weather phenomenon that has dominated the firefight out here. Crews mopping up inside the Cove fire are keenly aware their situation could change in an instant. A change in wind direction could put them back in the path of the wildfire. You make a mistake on your interpretation of the weather or how it relates to the fire behavior. There can be some serious consequences to that. There's a reason Operation Section Chief Patrick Titus includes weather in his morning fire line updates. We have five days in a row of plume dominated fire behavior, which is pretty unusual. This is a plume, a pyrocumulus cloud to be exact, and the weather it can create is the daily wildcard in the Modak-July complex firefighting strategy. The plume you guys saw was interesting. It was an island inside the fire, and I came in here and it was at 28,000 feet. And that day, actually, I was picking up small pine cones that were coming out of that plume. Pine cones and other flying cinders trigger spot fires outside the established fire lines, and that's exactly what you see happening here right now. After a wet winter, there's an abundance of dry dead grass, along with juniper and pine just waiting to combust. It only takes one spark. So how does the pyrocumulus phenomenon form in the first place? So a pyrocumulus form is when you have unstable conditions up high in the atmosphere and a really hot fire. So you have strong updrafts, and as it reaches a certain level, there's enough moisture in the atmosphere where it kind of creates a cloud. Meteorologist Jimmy Tager is tasked with closely watching and analyzing the weather, including pyrocumulus-generated weather. They can impact a fire even as they collapse and die. So when a thunderstorm collapses or pyrocumulus collapses, then you have winds kind of outflowing in all directions. And when you have different topography going on, the winds could be swirling in different ways to where it's going to totally change the fire behavior. Which is why crews like these keep one eye on the sky. And the forecast for today is not optimistic. Still high temperatures, low humidity, and high winds are expected as well, and that of course does not bode well for the fire or the firefighters. Visit our online newsroom at OESNews.com to learn more about this program and get the latest news and information from our team. Don't miss our next video on your Facebook timeline. Click our page and you'll get the latest posts as they happen. If you're an Instagram user, you can see the latest snapshots by following our Cal OES Instagram account. And Twitter users can get instant access to our tweets from across the state by following Cal OES.