Do Strange Glowing Cloud Sightings Indicate Climate Change?
My boss was in France on Bastille Day last week where the big event of the night actually became the sight of these strange glowing clouds - - like polar noctilucent clouds except they were not over the North Pole - but over Paris.
But Bastille Day celebrants were not the only ones to grab pictures of these strange new clouds.
Over the last week, photographers in many places around the world outside the Arctic regions, have run outside to get photos of these strange Noctilucent (Night Glowing) clouds showing up this week from Poland to North Dakota:
Formed by ice literally at the boundary where the earth’s atmosphere meets space 50 miles up, they shine because they are so high that they remain lit by the sun even after our star is below the horizon.
Noctilucent clouds are a fundamentally new phenomenon in the temperate mid-latitude sky, and it’s not clear why they’ve migrated down from the poles. Or why, over the last 25 years, more of them are appearing in the polar regions, too, and shining more brightly.
“That’s a real concern and question,” said James Russell, an atmospheric scientist at Hampton University and the principal investigator of an ongoing NASA satellite mission to study the clouds. “Why are they getting more numerous? Why are they getting brighter? Why are they appearing at lower latitudes?”
