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Cloud iridescence or irisation is a colorful optical phenomenon that occurs in a cloud and appears in the general proximity of the Sun or Moon. The colors resemble those seen in soap bubbles and oil on a water surface.
The misleading term "fire rainbow" is sometimes used to describe this phenomenon, although it is neither a rainbow, nor related in any way to fire. The term, apparently coined in 2006, [3] may originate in the occasional appearance of the arc as "flames" in the sky, when it occurs in fragmentary cirrus clouds. [4]
Because of this, rainbows are usually seen in the western sky during the morning and in the eastern sky during the early evening. The most spectacular rainbow displays happen when half the sky is still dark with raining clouds and the observer is at a spot with clear sky in the direction of the Sun. The result is a luminous rainbow that ...
The clouds are formed of tiny ice crystals which create the colours as light shines through them.
"Cloud iridescence reminds me of pixie dust or unicorn sprinkles," one meteorologist told CBS News. Here how that colorful weather phenomenon is formed. Rare "rainbow cloud" spotted over Virginia
In the Anglo-Cornish dialect of Cornwall, United Kingdom, sun dogs are known as weather dogs (described as "a short segment of a rainbow seen on the horizon, foreshowing foul weather"). It is also known as a lagas in the sky which comes from the Cornish language term for the sun dog lagas awel meaning 'weather's eye' ( lagas , 'eye' and awel ...
Nacreous clouds are rarely spotted in the UK because of the exceptional conditions needed.
The circumzenithal arc, also called the circumzenith arc (CZA), the upside-down rainbow, and the Bravais arc, [1] is an optical phenomenon similar in appearance to a rainbow, but belonging to the family of halos arising from refraction of sunlight through ice crystals, generally in cirrus or cirrostratus clouds, rather than from raindrops.