"[7] Analogous to the meteorological distinction between cumulus and cumulonimbus, the CbFg is a fire-aided or caused convective cloud, like a flammagenitus, but with considerable vertical development.

[9][10] The CbFg was first recorded in relation to fire following the discovery in 1998[8] that extreme manifestations of this pyroconvection caused direct injection of large abundances of smoke from a firestorm into the lower stratosphere.

[11][12][13][14][15] The aerosol of smoke comprising CbFg clouds can persist for weeks, and with that, reduce ground level sunlight in the same manner as the “nuclear winter" effect.

This was formalised in the 2017 update to the WMO International Cloud Atlas,[23] which states that any Cumulonimbus that is clearly observed to have originated as a consequence of localised natural heat sources will be classified by any appropriate species, variety and supplementary feature, followed by flammagenitus.

[26] The thunderstorms often drifted away from their source region at the top of the plume, producing sometimes significant amounts of localized rainfall, "mudfall," and ash fall.

[27] Further investigations confirmed that the volcano had clearly enhanced the convective environment, causing thunderstorms to form on average earlier in the day and more reliably than in surrounding areas, and that the presence of volcanic ash in cloud tops in the upper troposphere could be inferred from satellite imagery in at least one case.

On 7 February 2009, the Black Saturday bushfires killed 173 people, destroyed over 2000 homes, burnt more than 450,000 ha, and resulted in losses of over four billion Australian dollars in Victoria, Australia.

Multiple fire plumes produced a number of distinct CbFg, some of which reached heights of 15 km on that day and generated a large amount of lightning.

[30] On 30 December 2019, two fire response vehicles were overturned by what was described as a 'fire tornado' originating from an active cumulonimbus flammagenitus cloud near Jingellic, New South Wales, Australia, on a day when multiple CbFg were recorded in the neighbouring State of Victoria to an altitude of at least 16 km.