A single flight landing in Colorado caused snowfall
- A United airlines flight turned the tables on extreme weather and created some of its own
- A flight landing in Denver caused a sudden burst of snowfall
- Government money has been put aside to try and replicate this phenomenon with little success
Published on Jan 29, 2025 at 7:16 PM (UTC+4)
by Daisy Edwards
Last updated on Jan 29, 2025 at 7:16 PM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Tom Wood
Where there is air traffic chaos, we know it’s usually caused by extreme weather or snowfall – however, in the case of this particular flight, it’s the other way around.
Residents in Colorado were shocked when a bumpy plane’s landing actually triggered an unprecedented scientific phenomenon
The plane managed to squeeze snowflakes out of clouds in the sky, briefly causing it to snow from one singular cloud.
The phenomenon is so interesting that government money has been spent trying to recreate it.
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Snowfall from only one cloud? That’s just ‘plane’ wrong!
On Saturday 25th January, residents living near Denver airport in Colorado were absolutely baffled by a sudden burst of snowfall.
While snow in winter is not a surprising event, the way this snowfall was caused was the surprising phenomenon.
United Flight 5528 was just landing from its 2+ hour flight from North Dakota when it flew through a special cloud in a phenomenon called ‘cloud seeding’.
The cloud was home to a family of supercooled water droplets, water droplets that would even stay liquid at below freezing temperatures.
In order to become snowflakes, the water droplets have to freeze onto something and thanks to the plane’s dirty exhaust materials, like little tiny micro-metals and soot, the droplets froze into weird artificial snowflakes.
When the plane flew through the cloud during its descent, it provided the cloud with all of the necessary materials to snow.
It didn’t seem to cause any issues for anyone, apart from causing mass confusion.
It’s happening ‘weather’ you like it or not
It’s very rare for random bursts of snowfall to occur due to manmade interventions but it’s exciting for meteorologists and civilians alike.
We may not see this very specific set of circumstances happen naturally again anytime soon due to the cloud’s location and the height of the plane’s flight being just perfect enough to spark this occurrence.
Some people love it when this happens so much that local governments in America are spending billions of dollars on trying to artificially cloud seed and create this effect, but they haven’t managed to affect the weather at all.
This cloud seeding phenomenon is snow joke.
