#horizontal rainbow

Horizontals, lines and rainbows

“Horizontal rainbow” over Paris

It’s a horizontal rainbow over the city of lights. What more do you want!?!?!?! Anyway, they tell me to write what it actually is. It’s a rainbow, but a slightly edited rainbow thanks to the sun position. A rainbow forms when sunlight passes through fine droplets of water and is bounced back to your eye. In this case, the rainbow is so low to the horizon that the bending downward the eye normally would see is missing; all that is viewable is the upper portion of the rainbow, and it's stretched out to the point of appearing flat.

The sun must be quite high in the sky to get this pattern where the rainbow sits along the horizon. It actually cannot happen in the far north or south latitudes; the Sun just does not get high enough to give the right angle. In those cases, the sunlight still can form an arc, but not the horizontal pattern seen here. Anyway, this happened after a fairly major rainstorm hit Paris, and here is the end result. What more can you ask for? It’s a set of gigantic horizontal color bars hanging over Paris!

-JBB

Links, photo shared online by Bertrand Kulik

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1303/rainbowparis_kulik_860.jpg

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2298481/Ooh-la-la-Rare-horizontal-rainbow-spotted-Paris-skyline-near-Eiffel-Tower.html

http://weather.aol.com/2013/03/27/rare-horizontal-rainbow-forms-over-paris-goes-viral/