The National Weather Service Forecast (NWSF) in Norman Okla. picked up a bug swarm on Wednesday that was so large that they mistook it for clouds.
Nothing seemed out of place at first when the NWSF detected what they believed to be rain clouds flying over Knox County, Texas.
"We didn't have any clouds yesterday to form anything like that," said Jonathan Kurtz, a meteorologist at the Norman Forecast Office, according to CNN.
As it turned out, what meteorologists thought were clouds was, in fact, a swarm of insects. Grasshoppers and beetles were flying from the ground up to 2,500 feet, covering an area of about 50 miles, Business Insider reported.
Check it out! Rangers at Copper Breaks State Park confirmed the radar is picking up grasshoppers & beetles! #texomawx pic.twitter.com/lBWjvai7Zw
— NWS Norman (@NWSNorman) July 22, 2015
The initial finding caught the meteorologists by surprise because they originally forecasted clear and sunny skies in that area.
"Our first indication was some kind of biological feature," Kurtz said.
Meteorologists from the NWSF called the Copper Breaks State Park in Quanah, Texas to verify their theory.
"We have grasshoppers and beetles around here but not anything more than usual," park manager David Turner said, according to the New York Daily News.
People on the ground could see the bugs flying around them, but because the bugs were all flying at different elevations, the "swarm" was practically invisible to them.
Forrest Mitchell, Observations Program Leader at the NSWF in Norman, said that it is difficult to connect a specific amount of insects to what the radar sees, as the size and proximity of the insects while they're flying have a major impact, Business Insider reported.
"It's fairly common during the warm season," Mitchell said. "It's a testament of the sensitivity of the radars we use."
