Tag Archives: Mother of pearl clouds

Heavy snow and mother of pearls

Woke up this morning to a beautiful sight of deep snow on the balcony and mother of pearl clouds (perlemorskyer) in the sky.  Added to the garden full of birds all day (still over 200 waxwings / sidensvans), a white-tailed eagle soaring over the bay and herons (gråhegre) flying past, it doesn’t get much better. I even enjoyed the hour shoveling snow!
Apparently there hasn’t been so much snow in Trondheim for 93 years so early in December (much less snow here than higher up though).
However, the forecast tomorrow is +8C and 30mm of rain…with the soil below frozen, this could become quite a mess!

Nacreous clouds (mother of pearl) over Trondheim

The last two days of 2016 were basically dull stormy days here in Malvik, but then suddenly the gaps in the clouds were illuminated by amazing rainbow-like high altitude clouds known as nacreous or mother of pearl clouds and as they are best seen when the sun is  just below the horizon (which it is all day long here), the display lasted most of the day until it clouded over! I’ve never seen this phenomenon before…it requires special weather conditions for these 15-25 km high polar stratospheric clouds to form….
A really memorable finale to 2016, better than any fireworks!!

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