Purple haze, don’t know why? Here’s the science behind the colourful fog seen in B.C.’s Okanagan | 24CA News

Some residents of British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley had been briefly enveloped in shades of pink and purple this morning.

In Kelowna, a pink-hued fog appeared for a number of minutes shortly after 7:30 a.m. PT earlier than returning to the extra normal gray.

“I thought, ‘OK, what’s going on out there?'” mentioned Lise Guyot of her response when she noticed the world flip pink via her window, earlier than she snapped some photographs.

“It looked surreal.”

In Penticton, about 60 kilometres south, the fog began out as purple at round 7:15 a.m. earlier than altering to pink and later blue, in accordance with resident Dana Coates, who took a photograph of the colorful sky over Okanagan Lake.

Residents of Summerland and different close by communities additionally reported seeing the identical.

Guyot mentioned her photographs present precisely what the fog seemed like in actual life — no filter. While she’s used to pink skies from sunrises and sunsets, she says being surrounded by a pink fog was a completely completely different expertise.

Overall, she mentioned, it lasted someplace between 10 and quarter-hour, rising up into the sky then coming down round her once more earlier than dissipating into a standard gray.

CBC science specialist Darius Mahdavi mentioned whereas it isn’t unparalleled, pink fog is “an incredibly rare phenomenon.”

It seems for a similar cause the sky adjustments color at dawn or sundown, he defined.

“When sunlight has to pass through more layers of atmosphere — or in this case, the suspended water droplets that make up the fog — some of the colours, especially the blues, get scattered out, leaving the reds and oranges and pinks to reach your eyes,” he mentioned. 

“But the conditions have to be just right and are near impossible to predict, so it’s really a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

“You may also quote me as saying that it is an unbelievable sight and I’m very jealous. ‘Cause I’m,” he added.

Guyot said she learned from her photographer father the importance of capturing a moment like the pink fog as soon as possible because of how quickly it can disappear.

“It’s simply that second: Sometimes you get fortunate,” she mentioned.