HUGE outbreak of Polar Stratospheric Clouds over Norway today! Mother of pearl clouds in realtime 4K

👉 Please consider supporting my channel by buying us a virtual coffee at: ​https://www.buymeacoffee.com/nightlights


Today we experienced a huge outbreak of these mesmerizing mother of pearl clouds, a.k.a polar stratospheric clouds, which are also dangerous for our ozone layer as they tend to destroy it!

I took this video from my place on Malangen, Norway on Jan 23rd 2023.

PSCs are also called mother-of-pearl clouds or nacreous clouds because their iridescence (diffraction of sunlight in tiny ice particles) is some of the strongest in clouds on Earth. Their strong colors are very visible with naked eyes, making the experience surreal, almost straight out of a fairy tale.

They are also some of the highest clouds on Earth, forming around 15-30km in altitude in very precise conditions, limiting their occurrence. It needs to be extremely cold up there (below 78°C), which can only be satisfied in the winter months above polar regions where the stratosphere is at its coldest. There, tiny ice particles (along with other chemicals present in type I) nucleate and form over mountain ranges because of vertical shears/strong winds to form lenticular structures (type II).