Monday, January 31, 2011

Appearance of winter rainbow delights students in Anderson

Sundogs are sometimes described as Alaska's "winter rainbows." But residents of Anderson, near the Parks Highway about 70 miles south of Fairbanks, saw a real winter rainbow this week, reports the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Students and teachers at Anderson School especially got a kick out of it, heading outside to take photos even though the temperature was about zero.

The rainbow was visible for about a half-hour, [teacher Nora] Gruner said. "It was one of the finest rainbows I've ever seen," she said.

But Gruner, who teaches middle school science, was unable to explain why a rainbow would appear in winter.

"I was like, ‘What's going on? Why is there a rainbow?' It has be to be raining for there to be a rainbow," she said.

That's when Gruner realized it actually was raining.

"We turned around and faced the sun and saw the silhouettes of tiny drops of rain," she said. "You could feel this little bit of mist on you."

Ted Fathauer of the National Weather Service elaborated.

The likely scenario is that warm air aloft melted snow falling from higher clouds and created tiny droplets of rain that froze as they moved down the mountains on the north side of the Alaska Range, Fathauer said. With the sun only 6 or 7 degrees above the horizon, it was at a perfect angle to create a rainbow, he said. A 1985 Alaska Science Forum article, written after the appearance of a winter rainbow over Fairbanks, adds further explanation of how water might not freeze even if the air temperature is below 32. Read more at the News-Miner.

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