SAEDNEWS: One of the tourists in the city of “Paraná” noticed a strange phenomenon while observing the sky and quickly turned on their camera to capture images of a rainbow cloud.
According to SAEDNEWS, The appearance of a cloud unlike any other in the world attracted everyone’s attention—a rainbow-colored cloud that, according to some, looked like a hole in the heart of the sky.
Rainbow clouds, also known as nacreous clouds, form at very high altitudes, specifically in the lower stratosphere, at around 21,336 meters above the Earth or even higher. Sometimes during winter days, after sunset or before sunrise, sheets of these incredibly bright and colorful clouds can be clearly seen in the dim twilight sky.
This rare type of cloud formation is called “polar stratospheric clouds” or “nacreous clouds,” and they can only be observed in high-latitude regions such as Iceland, Alaska, northern Canada, Scandinavian countries, and Antarctica.
To better understand, most of the highest clouds in the troposphere reach a maximum altitude of about 13,000 meters above the Earth. Normally, clouds do not form in the stratosphere because there is not enough moisture. However, nacreous clouds are different. They are not entirely made of tiny water droplets; instead, they consist of a natural mixture of water and nitric acid, which originates from industrial sources.
Such chemical reactions do not occur anywhere else in the atmosphere. This is why the ozone layer hole is more prominent in polar regions. Nacreous clouds are also more commonly visible in the Southern Hemisphere. As a result, the ozone layer over Antarctica is thinner compared to the North Pole.
