Folks Near Fairbanks Wowed By A Winter Rainbow

Caption: Students and faculty at Anderson School gather outside to watch an unusual winter rainbow Wednesday morning, Jan. 26, 2011. Meteorologist Ted Fathauer at the National Weather Service in Fairbanks called it “an extraordinary event.” Brea Scothorn photo




Hardly ever happens in that very-cold place in winter, but on Wednesday it was above freezing and raining up above:

One of Gruner’s students, eighth-grader Tiana Montez, was the first to notice the rainbow at around 11 a.m.

“I was walking to the teacher’s desk and I saw it out the window,” Montez said. “I was like, ‘Whoa, there’s a rainbow and it’s winter.’ It was cool.”

...The whole class ran outside to look at the rainbow, and it wasn’t long before the school’s entire student body — including teachers — were standing in zero-degree temperatures admiring the rainbow, Gruner 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.”

...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.