Think you’ve seen everything nature has to offer? Odds are, as these absolutely mesmerizing weather phenomena events require very specific conditions to occur, you probably haven’t seen them all. Events that are so rare and captivating that they may seem unbelievable at first, but they really do happen, like a fallstreak hole, or punch hole cloud, a large circular or elliptical gap, that can appear in cirrocumulous or altocumulous clouds. While it looks like a spaceship is about to come down through the clouds, the holes are actually formed when the water temperature in the clouds is below freezing, but the water has not frozen yet due to the lack of icenucleation particles. When ice crystals form, it will set off a domino effect that causes the water droplets around the crystals to evaporate, leaving a large, often circular, hole in the cloud.
Light Poles
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Light poles can be seen after dark over large cities with different colored lights. They only appear during very cold weather, at temperatures of -4 Fahrenheit or lower, there must not be a strong wind and there has to be lots of tiny ice crystals in the atmosphere.
Fire Rainbows
Photo Credit: interestingfacts.org
A stunning work of nature, fire rainbows aren’t a common sight. These circumhorizon arcs, commonly known as CHA in scientific language, occur in cirrus clouds that are wispy and thin. The clouds have to be at 20,000 feet in the sky, with the sun at 58 degrees. The amount of ice crystals in the clouds also need to be properly aligned for the light to pass through it.
Lenticular clouds
Photo Credit: Jim George KING5 Weather via FOX
Photo Credit: Jim George KING5 Weather via FOX
These stationary lens-shaped and sometimes multi-layered clouds form at high altitudes when moist air is forced to flow upward around mountain tops. Because of its dramatic appearance and smooth, lens shape, people have been mistaking this type of cloud for flying saucers or “visual cover” for UFOs for decades.
Auroras
Photo Credit: Visit Rovaniemi via CNN
Auroras or polar lights are a spectacular natural light display in the skies of high latitude regions, caused when energetic electrically charged particles from solar wind accelerate along the magnetic field lines into the upper atmosphere, where they collide with gas atoms, causing the atoms to give off light.
http://www.earthporm.com/mesmerizing-weather-phenomena/
