Boring Blogitis but Exciting Rainbows

Yesterday somebody accused me of having "boring blogs" lately. It's true in some ways, I don't write like I used to. This is for a couple reasons.

For one, after helping train the News Center staff (the people who write the headlines you see at right and on the front page of AccuWeather.com) over the last couple years, they've taken over a lot of the national weather topics that I used to write about, even the controversial ones, and repeating what they say would be... well, boring.

The other reason (and I can't stress this enough) is admittedly a lack of time on my part - I do put several interesting stories each day on my Twitter/Plurk/Tumblr fees which flow into J's Breaking Weather News at right. If you come to my blog and I haven't written a new entry yet on any given day, or you don't like what I'm writing about, check J's Breaking Weather News -- you're guaranteed to find interesting stuff there, including important things the media is NOT covering, as well as other hot stories on AccuWeather.com. For example today we have:

+ FL Keys: We may decrease evacuations. http://bit.ly/ue2OG+ PHOTOS: China Flooding http://bit.ly/LJNZr+ Southwest Drought leads snakes into homes http://tinyurl.com/nvvgfa

That said, check out the photo below (apologies to our wireless AccuWeather.com users who may not be able to see the photo) that I was lucky enough to snap last night around 8 PM. This is straight out of the camera, no modifications. The rainbow really was that bright. Check out the Supernumeraries (repeating colors to the left of the rainbow itself), which I have explained before and I'll let the Atmospheric Optics website give you more details. It was also a double rainbow, you can see other pics and a video here. The rainbow was also caught by the local paper.

It was near sunset, so the bow's edges were nearly vertical. Remember, that only happens at sunrise or sunset; closer to solar noon (and a few hours either side) the rainbow is very low. To quote Atmospheric Optics:

"At sunrise or sunset a rainbow's centre, the antisolar point, is on the horizon. The rainbow is half in the sky, a semicircle. As the sun rises the bow's centre sinks. Eventually when the sun is 42º high only the tip of the bow is visible above the horizon."