The sun seemed to set in yellow this afternoon, filtered by thick
cirrostratus, but some time after sunset there was a pink flush
across the entire sky, lighting up the underside of the Cs and
Ci and revealing extensive fallstreaks and well as some patches
below the main sheet .... became quite reddish-purple as the
light faded.

I can't remember such a contrast between pre-sunset and
post-sunset colours before ... not that I spend much time
looking.

Philip

Philip Eden wrote:
The sun seemed to set in yellow this afternoon, filtered by thick
cirrostratus, but some time after sunset there was a pink flush
across the entire sky, lighting up the underside of the Cs and
Ci and revealing extensive fallstreaks and well as some patches
below the main sheet .... became quite reddish-purple as the
light faded.

I can't remember such a contrast between pre-sunset and
post-sunset colours before ... not that I spend much time
looking.

Philip

Was the second phase like this (Stogursey):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/treetop...os/2221195742/

On 27 Jan, 22:24, Rodney Blackall
wrote:
In article , Philip Eden

philipATweatherHYPHENukDOTcom wrote:
The sun seemed to set in yellow this afternoon, filtered by thick
cirrostratus, but some time after sunset there was a pink flush across
the entire sky, lighting up the underside of the Cs and Ci and revealing
extensive fallstreaks and well as some patches below the main sheet ....
became quite reddish-purple as the light faded.
I can't remember such a contrast between pre-sunset and post-sunset
colours before ... not that I spend much time looking.
Philip

Saturday
Similar here in Buckingham. The contrails above the Cs glowed a deep red for
a long time after sunset. Can't remember seeing anything like it in the UK
before. It MUST be connected to that pressure jump earlier today! It means
we are ALL DOOOOMED!

P.S.
Sunday
It occurred to me that the pressure jump could be a ULF sound wave caused by
a sizable extraterrestial body exploding in the stratosphere somewhere West
of Ireland. Its dusty debris would give the sunset colour notably absent
this evening. There could be a good paper here if someone could draw
isochrones of the jump; define an area of origin; search Meteosat images of
that area for a significant transient.

P.P.S. I don't suppose any computer models would show such a jump caused by
a meteorological phenomenon because they specifically filter out such
transients.

--
Rodney Blackall (retired meteorologist)(BSc, FRMetS, MRI)
Buckingham, ENGLAND
Using Acorn SA-RPC, OS 4.02 with ANT INS and Pluto 3.03j

An interesting idea, Rodney. I too noticed Saturday's late and very
red-purple sunset colouration. Fortunately I was watching the sunset
and took a series of photographs of Cs and St fra during the
'ordinary' sunset from 1612 to 1631 (sunset was at 1641 here). The
colours had reached their peak so I went off to do something else,
noticing more than 30 min later to my great surprise that the sky was
once again ablaze with a deep red. I took several other photographs
between 1706 and 1708 - long after the sunset colours would have faded
in a 'normal' sunset - and these confirm the deep ruddy red glow. I
thought at the time it strongly resembled the 'volcanic sunsets' of
1985 (after El Chichon) and 1991 (Pinatubo) and I did wonder whether
I'd missed news accounts of a big volcanic eruption recently. Perhaps
this explains it.

I'd be happy to make them available to anyone who wanted to research
something along the lines that Rodney suggests - just e-mail me.

--
Stephen Burt
Stratfield Mortimer, Berkshire