Storm derecho turns sky green in three US states; here’s how and why it happened

South Dakota, July 08: The residents of South Dakota in the United States witnessed a bizarre occurrence as the sky in the US state of South Dakota turned an eerie shade of green in a rare phenomenon.

 

 

Many people took to Twitter to share photos of the eerie phenomenon, with cloud-darkened skies whipping up a nearly photosynthetic hue. Reacting to that images, netizens compared them with the hit Netflix series 'Stranger Things' in which such imagery has been depicted.

 

 

 

The real reason for the dramatically -altered color of the sky in South Dakota was a storm known as Derecho. As per the US’s National Weather Service, it is “a widespread, long-lived, straight-line windstorm associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms”.

 

The scientific reason behind the skies turning green in the various states in the US is that the light interacts with thunderstorms holding a huge amount of water in them. As per reports, the big raindrops and hail scatter away all but the blue wavelengths of the light due to which primarily blue color penetrates below the storm cloud. This blue then combines with the red-yellow of the afternoon or the evening sun to produce a green effect or color.

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