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This page shows some pictures from Iceland, taken on March 5, 1999. (The filenames are the start of pass times.) There appears to be a large cold mass, about 10km in diameter, starting somewhat before 0747 UTC. This develops over the next hour by drifting perhaps more than 10km south-east, but it looks as the major part of the cold mass stays in position, while another part drifts. By the evening it has disappeared. The cold mass appears in the second of the infra-red images below. It is at the east end of Vatnajokull, and I'm not aware of any volcanoes in the area. Of course, in my ignorance, I would expect volcanic gases to show up as dark, hot areas, not cold, light ones. When we visited Iceland some year ago we went on a snowcat onto that huge glacier. Both infra-red and some visible pictures (channels 4 and 2) are shown below, from APT signals from various satellites. I would be very interested to know if anyone has an explanation for this - whether a natural or an artificial phenomenon. Please e-mail me at the address below, or use the WXSAT mailing list. Which is what Ron Goodson did, with the following explanation: "Also.. your "white cloud" on the Iceland "puzzle" looks like nothing more than some orograhically induced cirrus cloud. It's quite common in the arctic with the very cold temperature and low tropopause. It doesn't take much of a upper-disturbance to generate a down-wind cloud shield. This occurs over very modest mountains/hills. As the disturbance moves on, the cloud shield dissipates rapidly. I bet I wouldn't have to wait more than a few days to find a similar example over the Arctic Islands." Morning images:
Evening images:
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