Our northerly location means we get to enjoy some of the best displays Mother Naure has to offer when it comes to the aurora, but we also get some of the best views of the beautiful polar noctilucent clouds which create bright highlighted streaks in our summer night skies. While they don’t dance like the northern lights, they’re equally spectacular to see. Noctilucent clouds have an air of mystery around them as it’s not fully understood how they form, but it’s possible we’re seeing them more often in our summers due to climate change.
Noctilucents are not like our usual clouds which live in the lower portion of our atmosphere called the troposphere but are located a whopping 50 miles above us in the mesosphere. At this very high altitude there is very little moisture available to make clouds, but as the climate warms, a little more is entering these higher elevations from more vigorous storms below. Like any cloud, the moisture needs a nuclei to cling onto – like a dust or sand particle to condense or to form ice.
At these levels the only dust will be from explosive volcanic eruptions or from meteors which have burned up entering our atmosphere – pretty cool stuff. During summer, polar regions receive continuous sunlight, which paradoxically leads to cooling in the mesosphere. You might think that more sun in the summer should warm the air up, which it does near the ground, but as that air rises it expands and cools.
This means in the summer with more warm air .