Photo: David Crawford

No, it wasn't a nuclear attack on Southeast Kelowna... but an unusual cloud formation on Wednesday had a strangely similar appearance.

It was just a regular Wednesday afternoon for David Crawford until he saw the spectacular sight.

He promptly took a snapshot to post on Facebook with the caption: “This cloud formation would seem to indicate a small nuclear device was detonated today in South Kelowna... Well, these things happen.”

You can rest easy.

Environment Canada meteorologist Matt Macdonald explains.

"What we're seeing here is a towering cumulus that has reached an inversion," he says.

"It was the beginning of a thunderstorm cloud. There's some heat in the atmosphere, some instability, and that's why it was growing vertically. But it hit the inversion layer due to a slight increase in temperature at around 10,000 feet, and that's when it started to spread out horizontally."