© NJ.com/UnaffiliatedVtrPeople all across New Jersey spotted a rare, colorful cloud formation known as a 'fire rainbow' on Tuesday, June 14. This was a view from Neptune City in Monmouth County.
If you happened to look up in the sky at the right time and in the right location Tuesday afternoon, you might have been lucky enough to see a rare, colorful cloud phenomenon known as a "fire rainbow."
Trisha Garlatti, of Edison, was one of those lucky ones. As she was driving through South River at about 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, she caught a glimpse of it and felt compelled to whip out her camera phone. "It was like a rainbow inside a cloud," she said.
© Toni HoffmanThe view from Spring Lake in Monmouth County.
Although it's commonly referred to as a fire rainbow, in the scientific world it's known as a circumhorizontal arc. And weather experts call it "cloud iridescence," said Sarah Johnson, a meteorologist at the
National Weather Service's regional office in Mount Holly.
Johnson said the conditions have to be right for this phenomenon to form, and on Tuesday those conditions were in play over parts of New Jersey: Thin clouds very high in the atmosphere, tiny ice crystals in the clouds, and sunlight hitting the ice crystals at a certain angle.
"It's basically the same principle behind what we normally see in rainbows," Johnson said. "But instead of dealing with rain droplets with regular rainbows, we're dealing with ice crystals, because these clouds are so high" and the temperatures are very cold up there.
If the clouds are shaped like an arc and the sunlight hits the ice crystals that are in those clouds, "they will refract the sunlight, creating the full spectrum of colored light instead of just white light," the meteorologist said.
Fire rainbows tend to form when thin, wispy cirrus clouds are high in the sky, as they were on Tuesday, about 15,000 feet above the ground, Johnson said. But they also could develop with even thinner clouds, such as cirrostratus clouds.
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