The Weather Notebook: Diamond Dust

Diamond Dust
Email your weather question

Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory here on the Weather Notebook. Check out this weather yarn from Laura Cooper, who listens - along with her friends - to New Hampshire Public Radio:

Laura: "We were having a round table discussion at lunch today and it centered around an amazing anecdote about frozen air. so I said "the only way to solve this is to ask Dave, cause he's the only one that knows anything about weather."

That's right!!

"The story goes that my co-worker, Don, was ice fishing on Stinson Lake and it was probably 30 below zero. The air around him became "foggy" but he swears there were ice crystals suspended in the "fog" and that he could take his hand and literally push them aside. can this be true? Or do we need to get Don professional help?"

Well Laura, Don was pushing the fog aside which shows a bit of aggression so you might want lock him up for awhile for that, but meteorologically he's doin' just fine. Don was awash in a sea of diamond dust, sometimes called ice fog. Diamond dust forms when it's so cold that fog is made of ice crystals that are so tiny they float. As far as Don's experience of sweeping the diamond dust away with his hand, well this type of thing happens in arctic areas with some frequency. In fact people have been known to walk through a diamond dust cloud, turn around and see a tunnel matching perfectly the outline of their body, where the sparkling ice crystals have disappeared. A body print in the air you might say, supported by the foot prints in snow.

We have been unable to find a picture of Diamond Dust but here is a link to an article by Ned Rozell about the phenomenon.