I Spotted Imaginary Night Clouds: This Is How You Can See This Rare Cloud | Science and the planet

The sky over Great Britain was beautifully colored again in several places last night by glowing noctilucent clouds. And also in the Netherlands, some sky watchers have been able to enjoy this special natural phenomenon. So Twitter was full of beautiful photos and videos. But did you know that you can also see nocturnal clouds here with us?

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Luminous clouds float much higher in the atmosphere than our “normal” everyday clouds. Where low, middle and high clouds are less than 12 km, noctilucent clouds are somewhere around 80 km. rise in the atmosphere.

It is thanks to this lack of fear of heights that we can sometimes enjoy this rare sight. Since it’s high up there, it’s icy cold, down to minus 90 to minus 145 degrees Celsius. As a result, ice can form around dust particles from meteorites and volcanoes. So you can talk roughly about “alien” clouds. Because these ice particles float so high, they can still reflect sunlight after sunset, when other lower clouds cannot. This is the case only from the end of May to July, when the sun does not sink far beyond the horizon. So they remain invisible for the rest of the year. On the other hand, the fast-moving pattern of the noctilucent clouds owes its erratic air currents above.

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Beautiful clouds and nocturnes are spotted more often these days than they were nearly 50 years ago. But the reason for this is less positive. It is, after all, due in part to climate change. This causes more water vapor and lower temperatures in the higher layers of the atmosphere. This means more ice, and therefore a greater chance of nocturnal clouds.

So don’t forget to search in the first hour after sunset. Who knows, you might spot them. Although there is no guarantee. It is still a rare and unpredictable phenomenon. One year there are none, the next year they appear multiple times, sometimes multiple times in the same month.