People in Al Ain, UAE were left puzzled when a mysterious hole like shape appeared in the sky. Some confused it with UFOs, others called it ‘gate to the other world’ while others assumed it as some message by the almighty. Some people even tweeted about the incident.
شوهدت هذه الظاهرة النادرة والجميلة صباح اليوم في مدينة العين
تُسمى hole punch cloud
أو ظاهرة fallstreak hole pic.twitter.com/NbOd9zofNk— إبراهيم الجروان (@ibrahimaljarwan) March 17, 2019
Sharing the video, he wrote: "This rare and beautiful phenomenon was seen this morning in Al Ain City."
Let's debunk the mystery of this hole for you- Skymet meteorologist M.Palawat on watching the video clears that the hole is nothing but a phenomenon called 'fall-streak hole'. This occurs when the temperature in the clouds falls below the freezing point but the water hasn't frozen yet due to lack of ice nucleation.
High to mid level clouds, are often composed of tiny water droplets that are much colder than freezing, but have yet to freeze. These water droplets just need a reason to freeze, which usually comes in the form of ice crystals. Usually this happens when an aircraft has passed through the area as planes passing through the cloud layer can bring these ice crystals.
Once the ice crystals meet the water droplets- they quickly freeze, grow and start to fall. A hole is left behind, which starts expanding outward as neighboring droplets start to freeze.
Such fallstreak formations are rather rare and can expand up to 50 km. Many a times they are mistaken for UFOs because of their shape.
So now that you have it here, we hope you won't confuse such formations with UFO's or the presence of extra-terrestrial.
Image Credits – www.weather.gov
Any information taken from here should be credited to Skymet Weather
