It was a bizarre sight in the skies of Prince George this morning.
One local photographer was able to snap a photo of a ‘fallstreak hole,’ a weather pattern sometimes mistaken for a UFO.
“I was at work. I just had to go outside and saw that little teeny tiny hole being created and opening up. I knew right away what it was, because I had read about it in the past,” said Serge Wolf of Prince George.
“It took about half an hour from the beginning until pretty much all the sky was blue. It’s a pretty fascinating phenomenon and it’s a first for me!”
Also known as a hole punch cloud, or a skypunch, fallstreak holes are a large gap, usually circular or elliptical, that can appear in cirrocumulus or altocumulus clouds.
The holes are formed when the water temperature in the clouds is below freezing, but the water in the supercooled state has not frozen yet.
When ice crystals eventually form, a domino effect is set off due to the Bergeron process, causing the water droplets around the crystals to evaporate.
The result? Swiss cheese skies, says Environment Canada.
“There is a bit of a mystery with them,” said Meteorologist Carmen Hartt, “We will often see a few of them in the same area in a day.”
The clouds are not exclusive to a single area; the event has been seen in many different places across the world.
“We used to think they were quite rare, but now with advances of satellite of pictures, we can actually see them on satellites. Sometimes they are as big as 50 kilometers in diameter,” Hartt explained.
Cloud watchers who have interesting sky photos are encouraged to share them on the #BCStorm hashtag on Twitter.