© Southern NLCs?? Taken by Mirko Harnisch on December 1, 2019 @ Dunedin, New Zealand
Enjoying the late-evening sky over the Southern Ocean just after 23.00 local time with the Sun 15° below the horizon. Some wispy blue-ish clouds low on the southern horizon were quite an unusual sight. They appeared to be high in altitude and very distant. Whether these were actual NLCs, I do not know. It would be an unusual sighting at this latitude.
Enjoying the late-evening sky over the Southern Ocean just after 23.00 local time with the Sun 15° below the horizon. Some wispy blue-ish clouds low on the southern horizon were quite an unusual sight. They appeared to be high in altitude and very distant. Whether these were actual NLCs, I do not know. It would be an unusual sighting at this latitude.
"This is a clear sign of planetary wave activity," says AIM principal investigator James Russell of Hampton University, which manages the Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere mission for NASA.
Planetary waves are enormous ripples of temperature and pressure that form in Earth's atmosphere in response to Coriolis forces. In this case, a 5-day planetary wave is boosting noctilucent clouds over Antarctica and causing them to spin outward to latitudes where NLCs are rarely seen.
Comment: Could this drift to lower latitudes have something to do with the "grand" solar minimum? Could it be related to the increasingly meandering jet stream? And perhaps also pronounced due to the increased loading of the atmosphere with meteor particulates? See:
- Gulf Stream is 15% weaker, region south of Greenland coldest in 1,000 years
- Scientists say a fluctuating jet stream may be causing extreme weather events
- Professor Valentina Zharkova explains and confirms why a "Super" Grand Solar Minimum is upon us
- Michigan Meteor Event: Fireball Numbers Increased Again in 2017
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