Odd rainbow clouds (HAARP?) Over Colorado 1/18/2012

reply to post by kalamatas

If clouds are water vapor, a gas....

No, actually....a common misconception spurred by may who use the vernacular of "vapor" to described clouds.

They are tiny water droplets, or ice particles if it's a cirrus or other type. Clouds can also be a mixture of both, depends on the freezing level (altitude). There is also the phenomenon of "super cooled" water....water that will remain liquid, even below freezing, until disturbed in some way.

reply to post by ProudBird


Thank you. I must return to cloud 101 study.

reply to post by ka119


Some good irridescence there

It's actually quite common but not always easy to see (without sunglasses) and harder to photograph well.

files.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by Essan
reply to post by ka119

 

Some good irridescence there

It's actually quite common but not always easy to see (without sunglasses) and harder to photograph well.

files.abovetopsecret.com...

Haha I had to hold my camera to my sunglass lense

reply to post by ka119


Unbelievable subtlety of colors in your pictures! I've seen them too, in Burbank, not quite like this though. The ones I saw were very very close to the sun, in clouds, and the colors were irridescently incandescent just like yours. That was the first time I ever saw them and alot of people were out looking with me. These also didn't move, just like yours. They lasted a long time too. Don't remember any immediate disaster afterwards but they all run together after awhile.

I'm not any expert or even any wannabe expert on HAARP but isn't it more acoustics? Whether human level or not. It's possible that whatever the particulate in the air that water attracted itself to on that day responded to a certain frequency. Or is it electrical? - don't really know.

I've seen alot of rainbows in my life but these are new under the sun.

reply to post by luxordelphi


well the fact that they werent moving, and didnt for the hour plus that i witnessed them, raises questions in my head.
They remained in the exact same shape and formation; everyone is saying that they are rainbows, but i have never seen moisture remain in the exact same position for so long, especially on such a windy day.
cool that you have seen them through, what a weird happening.

Originally posted by ka119
.... everyone is saying that they are rainbows, but i have never seen moisture remain in the exact same position for so long, especially on such a windy day.

Who is saying they are rainbows

It's irridescence, a well known and common phenomena seen in high level clouds close to see the sun (relatively speaking) - and as you discovered, much better seen and photographed through a polarising lens. Or sunglasses.

More info:

en.wikipedia.org...

www.atoptics.co.uk...

cimss.ssec.wisc.edu...

Originally posted by Essan
Who is saying they are rainbows

Well if you refer back to the first page, Mileslong INSISTS that they are rainbows
so hands together for that guy..
Thanks for your answers though.

Still nothing explains why they did not move, nor change shape in over an hour..?

reply to post by ka119

Still nothing explains why they did not move, nor change shape in over an hour..?

Did you stare at the iridescence directly for that entire hour+? Never taking your eyes from it?

Or, did you film (video) it, for playback later, to ascertain that it did indeed "not move, nor change shape"?


Also, although often at high altitude the winds can be very strong, they can also be light, to almost nil. The clouds can also be "moving" with the winds, but in a sort of "standing wave" formation. Other words, the individual little particles are moving, but the huge overall formation seems to be stationary.


The effect can best be seen in time-lapse:



The ^ ^ ^ above is of course not a cirrus, but the idea is illustrated visually.


Here, found a better one, filmed over Boulder:

reply to post by ka119


The government-military-mad scientists- whatever have sent payloads into the upper atmosphere with the stated intent of creating irridescent clouds.

coto2.wordpress.com...

That's a link to a news story at the time in 2009 apparently originally posted on space.com. Other sources I read implied that there is some sort of a 3 year time-lag between the particles in the upper atmosphere and the appearance of these clouds.

The ones I saw were much earlier - around 2002 or 2003 and also they were almost on top of the sun unlike these, I think. The colors though were very very similar. It was the kind of event where people came out of their office buildings to have a look.

Ultrafine particle science (otherwise known as nano) has also come a long ways and some particles have very strange and unusual properties - I know some have been developed for a blue hue. Some are developed for reflectant properties.

HAARP frequencies + nano particles in the atmosphere = ?? If the grid lines in the sky are for a military communications or anti-communications network, HAARP would be involved and it's hard to say how that all would pan out visually. Very interesting.

reply to post by luxordelphi


Oh, my.....would you please read and understand the links you provide first, before posting comments about them that are incorrect, instead of just skimming them and misunderstanding the science and the facts? It is against ATS T&Cs to knowingly post false or misleading information, or to misrepresent the facts.

HAARP frequencies + nano particles in the atmosphere...

Your link to the NASA experiments to sent rockets into....get this.....into space, to altitudes of over 50 miles up!

This has nothing, zero, nada, zilch to do with the OP's observance of of iridescent clouds that are only a few miles above the ground. It has NOTHING to do with HAARP.

('HAARP' has become the "Poster Boy" of the most idiotic claims, it is a catch-all and easy to "blame", for those who know absolutely nothing about it, and don't even bother to learn the facts.....just parrot the ridiculous conspiracy ferar mongers, over and over).


From your link:

The clouds are intended to simulate naturally-occurring phenomena called noctilucent clouds, which are the highest clouds in the atmosphere.

“This is really essentially at the boundary of space,” said Wayne Scales, a scientist at Virginia Tech who will use computer models to study the physics of the artificial dust cloud as it’s released. “Nothing like this has been done before and that’s why everybody’s really excited about it.”

(Note my emphasis).


Here is the link to the Noctilucent Clouds that were mentioned in the snippet above, first line.

The noctilucent or "night-shining" clouds are at an altitude of 47 to 53 miles (76 to 85 km), where meteors and bright aurora lights are not uncommon and the atmosphere gives way to the blackness of space. The clouds remain a scientifically baffling phenomenon more than 120 years after their discovery.

Also in your post (not added here) you again tried to conflate HAARP and the "grids". Grid lines of absolutely normal and benign contrails, formed by jets crossing paths because they are flying on different headings. They aren't even that extensive, when considered as a percentage of the ENTIRE Earth's surface area. They are insignificant in that regard. They are not even that common, certainly not a daily occurrence.

HAARP has NO influence on the atmosphere at altitudes where contrails reside....a mere 6 to 8 miles or so above the surface. HAARP is designed to interact with the ionosphere!!

The ionosphere (here's another link about it, and about HAARP: *source*) starts, as you see (and has been mentioned dozens of times already, in other threads) at an indeterminate altitude, but an average of 50 miles (80 km) or so:

At heights of 80 km (50 miles), the gas is so thin that free electrons can exist for short periods of time before they are captured by a nearby positive ion. The existence of charged particles at this altitude and above, signals the beginning of the ionosphere a region having the properties of a gas and of a plasma. The ionosphere is indicated by the light green shading in the figure to the left.

Please try to make the effort to add this information to the level of scientific knowledge and understanding that seems to be lacking so tragically in many segments of our society.........


The clouds referred to by the OP were not "noctilucent" (**) types.

(**)

They are normally too faint to be seen, and are visible only when illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon while the lower layers of the atmosphere are in the Earth's shadow.

The photos by the OP clearly show clouds in the atmosphere, and specifically in the troposphere.

What are photographed in the OP are examples of iridescence.

....most often observed in altocumulus, cirrocumulus and lenticular clouds, and very rarely in Cirrus clouds.

Iridescent clouds are a diffraction phenomenon cause by small water droplets or small ice crystals individually scattering light.

reply to post by ProudBird


YOU are telling me about misrepresenting facts? Most people don't know that the government-military-mad-scientists-whatever have been creating clouds since at least WWII. Giving a cloud a name explains nothing except in blind-faith pseudo-science. Cirrus Aviaticus that fill our skies are human generated - created by jet emissions. There is nothing 'natural' about them.

When one reads about the atmosphere one invariably reads these words: IT IS LITTLE UNDERSTOOD. There is not an authority and my speculation is no different from the speculation you put forth. Experimenting with the miles high atmosphere is no different than experimenting with the comparatively near, cirrus cloud height, atmosphere.

Don't try to make it sound like these people know what's going to happen because they don't and they admit it. HAARP, itself, is touted as an experiment. Research and data gathering are other benign names for experiments ongoing as in the link I provided to give a clue that it's on and been on.

Well at least this thread is starting some good discussion!
Proudbird- I took the pictures when I first saw the clouds, then my roommate and I compared the pictures to what we were looking at after lunch and it was identical, I have no idea why I did not take pictures of the after, but then again why would I lie about something like this?
I just find it odd.
Interesting videos you posted, thats pretty cool to watch.

I would not have posted about this if I just thought these were rainbow clouds.. there was just something off about them, something you got from them in person that was not conveyed in the pictures. For all I know you all may be right, I am just adding the fact that intuition sensed something odd about these.

Anyways, cary on!

I think there is some confusion in this thread.

Firstly, the photographs ka119 posted in his/her OP are of iridescent clouds. I have taken hundreds of photographs of iridescent clouds over the last 2 or 3 years, so there is little doubt in my mind about that. Iridescence in clouds is actually very common.

Here's one I took in June last year, here in the UK.


Secondly, the youtube footage which ka119 posted (and I have re-posted below) is of an circumhorizon arc, not iridescence, which although superficially similar, is fundamentally different in nature to a circumhorizon arc.



If you try a google image search (sorry - couldn't get the link directly to search results to work) for "circumhorizonal+arc", and you compare the results to the footage, note how a circumhorizon arc always has red at the top and green/blue at the bottom, exactly like the footage taken preceding the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan.

Here's a screenshot.


It's actually not *that* uncommon for there to be a circumhorizonal arc in the sky in locations at 30 degrees latitude (about the latitude of Sichuan), where the sun is high enough in the sky for a CHA to be present during a significant part of the day.

Latitude is the key. The sun must be higher than 58° to form the arc. The further from the equator the less time that the sun is sufficiently high.

Source: atoptics.co.uk

Ten minutes before the earthquake, my planetarium software tells me that the sun would have been over 71 degrees, which is more than high enough for a CHA.

An hour later the sun was till high enough in the sky for a CHA.

Noticed the same thing yesterday here in The UK as shown in my video above. The strange thing is there was no rain all day but this rainbow was hovering above the clouds. I put it down to the sun reflecting on the water in the clouds.