Interesting weather phenomena: Explanation?

On my daily morning walk I came across a rather beautiful phenomena, which I do recall seeing before in some distant past but seems to be rather rare.

What did I see? A, short-lived, “glowing” of my surroundings. As if my eyes, temporarily, grew polarizing filters. The greens and especially the yellows, browns and oranges were affected.

I’m at a loss to explain this. I do think this might have to do with the sunrise and some of the rays getting under/through the clouds and the wet surfaces amplifying the rays in some way. But that’s all speculation on my part.

Some details:

  • Duration: less than 5 minutes,
  • Overcast. No blue skies anywhere, just (light) grey, detailed, clouds,
  • Rain (A light, constant drizzle),
  • Wet surfaces all around,
  • This was at about 07:00,
  • Sun up in this neck of the woods: 06:41
  • Golden hour window: 06:41-07:54

Anybody have any insights?

Oh, before someone says pictures or it didn’t happen: At the time I didn’t realize this would less not 5 minutes. My surroundings were not nice enough to take a shot, the phenomena was gone when I did reach a nice spot :frowning:

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Hello Jacques,
you might want to take a look through the book by Marcel Minnaert " Light and Color in the Outdoors (Springer, 1993, original in Dutch 1974). He explains all sorts of light phenomena related to sun, moon and atmosphere.

Hermann-Josef

Perhaps it was the 5G geo-engineering rays? :wink:

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@Jossie: Thanks for that tip.

I’ve been on an internet search binge, but those dumb search-engines think that I’m looking for pretty pictures of coloured clouds or sunrises :smile: So, no luck up 'till now.

@Brian_Innes: Isn’t 5G yesterdays news already? Aren’t al the interesting illnesses and catastrophes causes by 6G? New, now with 100 times the effectiveness! :scream:

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@Jade_NL Were you seeing impossible colours? Sometimes notable but difficult to describe colours fall into this category.

Interesting subject! Not sure if this is what happened. But I’m not dismissing it entirely; Experiences has shown that eyes+brain behave weirdly at times.

The colours I was looking at are the ones I see on a daily base and these are colours abundant in nature: Green/brown bushes and shrubs, grasses in all its green variants, cornflowers, red/yellow/orange flowers etc etc. To give you a rough idea, it was very close to where I took this shot. So, all natural.

It was as if someone turned up the saturation a few notches and everything had a slight halo. It appeared and disappeared the same way a rainbow does, only the duration was shorter.

Usually impossible colours are subtle in that they aren’t everywhere you look but end up enhancing the scene in a special way. I may have super powers because they also bounce a bit for me.

We are getting ahead of ourselves. It is more likely due to mist, fog, haze and / or bloom.

@Jade_NL, I live in a “tornado alley” region of the US (central Alabama). Sometimes, for several minutes before a tornado or severe thunderstorm, the sky takes on a strange color glow, often green, but sometimes yellow or pink. My father taught me to watch for that and to take cover if I saw it. It sounds similar to what you’re describing, but I don’t know a reason for it.

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I’m (un?)lucky enough to live in a part of the world that is rather moderate when it concerns weather. The “only” weather related problems the Dutch have battled for the last few centuries are floods caused by storms (and living below sea-level). We are rather good at that though.

The phenomena of a discolouring sky before bad weather strikes isn’t unfamiliar to me though. But hereabouts it is mostly green-grey skies that announce this (if at all).

It didn’t rain this morning, but I did have a good look at the sunrise, clouds and time.

  • The above described phenomena was at sunrise (+/-06:40) and not 07:00 as mentioned before (which was a guess).
  • There’s a rather small time window when the sun is just climbing the horizon when it is extremely warm coloured (think deep red-orange). Both windows seem to be the same.
  • I couldn’t see it due to the clouds, but some other place is the Netherlands did have a very nice warm and colourful sunrise yesterday morning .

I, cautiously, came to the following conclusions: This was caused by the bend, warm sunlight during sun-up, which in turn were reflected/refracted between the wet ground and clouds/rain. Add a bit of a prism effect (the fine rain and wet surfaces) and you could have what I saw.

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I have noticed that skies tend to be deep blue if you look up vertically above you, but degrade to cyan as you look towards the horizon. I’m guessing, in the horizon direction, the atmosphere layer is thicker. Since nitrogen is supposed to emit in deep blue, it would mean that the cyan direction has more water vapor. Not sure, then, if that high vapor direction is emitting more in cyan than blue, or if it is because it catches more sun light (color + white light = hue shift, see Abney effect), or if it gets more bounced light from green things in the landscape.

I’m at the southern end of Alabama (Mobile) and have the same color glow as a warning (we had a doozy a few weeks back with a bruised, orange-colored sky along a horizon under some ridiculously black and heavy clouds.

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Likely to get rainy there later today, tomorrow. Be safe!

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I experienced similar thing 2 months ago but easily explained.
It was just a neon red sunset. The entire sky was so neon red that people were stopping in the middle of the road and jumping out of their cars to watch it. No one honked at another, everyone was just in awe.

I took a picture with my phone, but it just looked like I applied a heavy Instagram filter so I deemed it not even worth posting it online xD.

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I’ve seen similar on cloudy mornings, as the sun variously shines through and is occluded by the clouds. Rain/mist can variegate it…

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