If any of you are interested in the follow up, I contacted a meteorologist in TN who is helping me with some local weather phenomena, and I told him about the video from Sichuan, China before the quake.

He wrote this about it (and send a photo he had taken of a similiar event):

>"Thanks for the link to the Sechuan video. It only took about 5 or 6
seconds of the video and I was able to tell that the color was not an
auroaral event (particularly since the electromagnetic energy from the
sun that creates the aurora is never sufficient to be seen even in dim
daylight, and that the energizing of our upper stratosphere by these
charged particles always must occur in the dark/back side of the earth,
or the area away from the "solar wind" that is constantly streaming from
the sun side of the earth.

The color in the sky as seen in the video is simply the refracted color
through the 90° angle faces of clean ice crystals in the sky and
produces a "circumhorizontal arc" . If you compare the color sequence
in the video with those of the attached example of one that I captured
several years ago, you will find that they match (red on top to green
and blue below). The video shows the position of the arc in the sky to
be a proper orientation parallel to the horizon (thus the name
circum-horizontal, (about the horizon). It is in no way connected to
the earthquake."