Recent occurrences of the unusual atmospheric phenomenon wowed people in the southern United States.
In January 2020, the sky over Sweden delivered an early valentine to people on the ground in the form of a heart-shaped hole in the clouds. Unfortunately, the sky appeared heartless to NASA satellites looking down from above. But other cases of the unusual atmospheric display—so-called “fallstreak holes”—dotted the sky that month over the southern United States.
The natural-color (left) and false-color (right) images above, acquired on January 29, 2021, show fallstreak holes west of Atlanta, Georgia. The natural-color image below shows a similar scene on January 7, 2021, northwest of Miami, Florida.
The locations are more than 500 miles apart, but the physics behind the phenomenon is the same. All of the images were acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.
Continue reading at NASA Earth Observatory
Image via NASA Earth Observatory
