Why Florida skies turned purple after Hurricane Michael

[mfcorey1]

Last edited Fri Oct 12, 2018, 08:31 AM - Edit history (1)

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/why-florida-skies-turned-purple-after-hurricane-michael/ar-BBOgbjG?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=mailsignout

America the Beautiful sings of "purple mountain majesties," but after deadly Hurricane Michael passed through Florida's panhandle, it was the skies that turned an eerie purple.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott called the hurricane an "absolute monster." As of Thursday night, CNET sister site CBS News reported that at least six people died when the Category 4 hurricane, now downgraded to a tropical storm, made landfall on Florida's Gulf Coast on Wednesday.

Track Hurricane Michael

But even after the hurricane had moved on, its weather pattern affected the Florida skies. Reporters and residents shared images of post-storm skies ranging from a light lavender to a deep violet, and it turns out there's a scientific explanation for the unusual hues.

There was enough interest in the purple palette that Florida-based First Coast News produced a short video of meteorologist Lauren Rautenkranz explaining the science behind it, noting that we normally see blue skies because blue wins out in a sort of scientific battle with violet.

[Achilleaze]

1. .

[jberryhill]

2. "it turns out there's a scientific explanation for the unusual hues"

The state of newspaper writing and editing continues to deterioriate.

Lines like this baffle me:

"it turns out there's a scientific explanation for the unusual hues"

A "scientific explanation" for the color of the sky? Gee, you don't say. I mean, shit, I thought it was God's kids playing with their crayons. Whodathunk it was a natural phenomenon of some kind?

[still_one]

3. My first thouoghts were WtF. It looks like the OP had a copy/paste isssue. First of all it has

nothing to do with Saudi Arabia alleged killing of the WP reporter, that just came out of nowhere, so I assume it was something leftover from the OPs keyboard cache.


If you go into the link this is the SCIENTIFIC EXPLANAION:

""As sunlight shines down to Earth, most of the colors of the spectrum are able to reach the surface uninterrupted," Rautenkranz said in the video. "But the shorter wavelengths, blue and violet, are scattered in every direction. This light bounces from particle to particle until it eventually reaches your eyes. But the sky doesn't appear violet and blue because of our eyes' limitations."

Normally, she said, our eyes can only detect blue, because violet is the shortest wavelength of the color spectrum. But after the hurricane, the conditions were right for purple to make an appearance. The air was super-saturated, dew points were in the mid- and upper 70s, the sun was setting, and the hurricane's clouds hung low to the ground.

"This combination allowed our eyes to see (the sky's) true colors, since violet is there to begin with, we just don't usually get to see it," Rautenkrantz said. "The light was scattered around the moisture in the air, causing the magical purple color."

[mfcorey1]

4. Apologies, I did pick up other information in the copying.

[still_one]

6. That is what I thought, and assumed it was left over from the last copy in the keyboard

cache. It can happen to any of us. I knew it was something like that

[jberryhill]

5. They should have stuck with God's crayons

Trying to explain Rayleigh scattering in a newspaper article is a lost cause, but I doubt anyone believed there was anything mystical about unusual weather making the sky look unusual.