Pink clouds in Leuven?

You know how you sometimes see something so beautiful you begin questioning reality? Well, this was that for me. It is snow season in Belgium and I was out for a walk at sunrise and serendipitously walked into a desktop wallpaper. And I know it sounds silly, but the fact that this warm orange/pink cloudscape was immediately followed by snowfall made the experience even more magical.

And as any magician would say, it is not magic, it is physics. Well, I'm paraphrasing—I don't know many magicians—but out of curiosity I began reading about cloud iridescence and atmospheric scattering of light, and despite my aversion to physics, I actually find the science of this pink snow cloud fascinating.

In essence, at sunrise the light actually travels a longer distance through the layers of Earth's atmosphere to reach my eye, where the smaller wavelengths of colours like green and blue get scattered or redirected from following a straight path. On top of this, heavy clouds of snow right above me act as a thick blanket of moisture, which also absorb and scatter these colours from the sun. Ultimately, this leaves the longer wavelengths of light to pass right through and paint the town red. I guess Doja was talking about atmospheric scattering of light when she dropped that song.

It was almost unfair to only witness this for a couple of minutes before the dark grey clouds took over the sky, but I have little to complain about when there is so much snow animating everything around me. Even park benches and bridges look like they were sketched by an excellent artist or, much more amusingly, an expert AI prompt designer.

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