NASA detects strange electric-blue clouds over Antarctica

wattsupwiththat.com ^ | January 8, 2018 | Anthony Watts & NASA Spaceweather.com

[Red Badger]

NASA’s AIM spacecraft is monitoring a vast ring of electric-blue clouds circling high above Antarctica.

These are noctilucent clouds (NLCs), made of ice crystals frosting specks of “meteor smoke” in the mesosphere 83 km above the frozen continent. Here is an animation from the past week:

This is the season for southern noctilucent clouds. Every year around this time, summertime water vapor billows up into the high atmosphere over Antarctica, providing moisture needed to form icy clouds at the edge of space. Sunlight shining through the high clouds produces an electric-blue glow, which AIM can observe from Earth orbit.

“The current season began on Nov. 19th,” says Cora Randall, a member of the AIM science team at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. “Compared to previous years of AIM data, this season seems to be fairly average, but of course one never knows what surprises lie ahead, particularly since the southern hemisphere seasons are so variable.”

The formation of strange clouds in the high atmosphere over remote Antarctica may seem to be of little practical interest–but that would be incorrect. Researchers studying NLCs have discovered unexpected teleconnections between these clouds and weather patterns thousands of miles away. Two years ago, for instance, Randall and colleagues found that the winter air temperature in many northern US cities was well correlated with the frequency of noctilucent clouds over Antarctica. Understanding how these long-distance connections work could improve climate models and weather forecasting–all the more reason to study eerily beautiful NLCs.

Source: NASA Spaceweather.com

[Red Badger]

It’s ‘strange’ ...................

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEINzEh_qYg

[TXnMA]

"No word on the hole in the Ozone ,LOL"

~~~~~~~

Why... there it is -- right in the middle... </SARC>

Perception-impaired are invited to highlight the remainder of the line following the closing ellipsis... '-)

[Swordmaker]

I think there may be another explanation for these "Electric-Blue clouds that appear over the Arctic at the edge of space. . . and that may be a plasma phenomena related to the electromagnetic effect of the Earth's Magnetic flux lines and the solar winds interacting. The cloud light pattern does not look to me to have anything to do with the line of termination one would expect if it were a sunlight phenomena. Instead, the clouds show no shadowing which one would expect from a point source or sun source, but act as if they were internally illuminated, a characteristic of plasma in glow discharge. One also has to ask exactly what "drags" this hypothetical "water vapor" into the upper atmosphere only at this time of year were this a purely weather phenomenon? That would be more logically explained by electric charged plasma as well. — Electric Universe PING

ELECTRIC UNIVERSE PING

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[Mastador1]

Someone has found Bush’s weather machine and is firing it up.