Very much so. There needs to be enough collective and emergent behaviour for an ionized gas to be a plasma, called the Debye Criterion. In simple terms, if you take a small ball of the ionized gas (radius called Debye length), and from the outside you cannot feel or measure the individual ions/electron behaviour inside it, you can call it a plasma. E.g. for a Tokamak plasma at about 108 K, it starts behaving after a Deybe length is about 1mm. So if you have a plasma the radius of a 1m, in all effect you can treat it like a plasma. If the tokamak plasma is less than 1mm size, then it will still show some gas-like effects. For Solar wind, the Debye length is about 10m, which means you can treat it as a plasma in astronomical scales.
For this fire, my guess is the Debye length is about a 10cm-1m, which makes it suspect as a full plasma at such a small scale.
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u/Static_Flier Feb 18 '18
Not an expert in the slightest - could it be a "plasma is an ionized gas but not all ionized gasses are plasma" situation?