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Sunday, September 7, 2008

Hanna's Gift: Rain and Rainbows

With the talk of the week come and gone (by the way, I think the forecast and track worked out pretty well), we did get some good things out of the storm.
This Doppler estimated Rainfall shows:
Yellow- Over 1.5 inches
Red - Over 3 inches
Purple- Over 6 inches west side of DC. Tony Pann informed me about numerous water rescues.
More rain fell north and west
Less rain fell around the beltway and the eastern shore...
After a wet spring and summer, August was about 2 inches below normal on rainfall. the 1.64" at BWI made up for some of that and keeps us 3.29" above normal on the year.

BEAUTY How about the rainbows... I did say plural... there was a double rainbow that formed after 7pm and was visible in most spots. Technically everyone sees a different rainbow anyway, I did not want to geek out today. This was most likely the brightest, and best looking natural rainbow I have ever seen. Glad I can a camera handy. Enjoy the pictures (which do not do the full double arch justice). I also have a YouTube video below....


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why does the second rainbow have the colors reversed?

And yes, you do say pretty darn cool quite a bit! :)

Justin Berk, AMS CBM said...

Well.. it was pretty cool. Imagine if I recorded a tornado what would have jumped out of my mouth many times....
As for the colors, it breaks down to the physics of how the light is bent of refracted in the raindrops. Without getting too technical, the light enters a raindrop (or many of them) and slows down in the water to break up the light. At the right angle is will bounce off of the back of the drop and come back the front with the light separated in all of the colors. When the sun is very low in the sky- such as the last half hour of the day, then the angle of refraction in the raindrop allows an extra bounce inside the drop. So it's like a mirror image, although it is a separate rainbow. I know that was technical, but at least I left out the angle degrees. I have that too if you are interested...