Brainstorm Answer: Strange Distant Sounds
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Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow for the Weather notebook and today, the answer to our latest Brainstorm. In that Brainstorm, if you recall - and I'm sure you do - we spoke with George Cleveland, at WMWV radio here in North Conway, New Hampshire. He told us about some strange sights and sounds:

George: "When it happens, it is a whomping sound is the best way to call it, as if you were listening to fireworks from a huge distance. It's accompanied by flashes of light. As..if you were looking at fireworks or a thunderstorm from a huge distance.

But when there's been cloud cover, it's just reflected all along the clouds and it's reflected on the snow, which really makes it eerie, when you hear that whoomp, whoomp."

Oddly enough, an earthquake occurred after one of these observations. But before you start thinking that George should submit his story to the X-Files, let it be known that others, like Charles Wang of Detroit, have witnessed the same thing.

Charles: "I was in Kalamazoo, MI facing south in the middle of the night. And I did see the sky glowing greenishly and it came in pulses just like there was a very distant fire. At first I thought it may have an aurora, but again, I was facing south and it was very late in the night and there was a whooshing sound as the person on the program said...a whoosh, woosh sound like that."

So, the question to you was, what is it?

Now, guesses ranged from volcanoes to ball lightning, to heat lightning, to a distant avalanche...but....none of those fit. What does fit is something called a cryoseism. And we'll hear more about it, tomorrow, right here on The Weather Notebook, a production of the Mount Washington Observatory.