Rare 'fire rainbow' spotted at the Jersey Shore

Sunday, May 26, 2019
AVALON, N.J. -- A rare fire rainbow was spotted at the Jersey Shore on Sunday.

Twitter user @packyM captured the rare site on the beach in Avalon, NJ near 64th Street.
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Photo via Twitter: @packyM



These are neither fire nor rainbows. Technically they are known as a circumhorizontal arc, an ice halo formed by hexagonal, plate-shaped ice crystals in high-level cirrus clouds. The halo is so large that the arc appears parallel to the horizon, hence the name.
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These appear mostly during the summer and only in particular latitudes. When the sun is very high in the sky, sunlight entering flat, hexagon-shaped ice crystals gets split into individual colors just like in a prism.

The conditions required to form a "fire rainbow" are very precise. The sun has to be at an elevation of 58 degrees or greater, there must be high altitude cirrus clouds with plate-shaped ice crystals, and sunlight has to enter the ice crystals at a specific angle.

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