A good meteorological omen, and a great way to start the new year

Completely OT, but who drew Denmark as a man with a cold on weather.com?
http://www.weather.com/maps/maptype/satelliteworld/germanysatellite_large.html?clip=undefined&region=undefined&collection=localwxforecast&presname=undefined

great pics! Nice job!!!

Dropped a lot of Retardant in that Chico country, nice to see a rainbow there.
When I saw Chico it was usually smoke and fire. Great Pic. set it as my wallpaper..

Nice view, Anthony, Happy New Year.
One comment about the city purchase of that land. All these enviro set-asides dilute the tax base, and us regular taxpayers have to pony up more. No one seems to consider that side effect of rampant do-goodism.

Aaaah we are not the enemies of the earth but its friends – wonder is all around us.

Thanks, for this blog and for the picture!
What a beautiful world we can enjoy when we escape the ego cage!
Best wishes to you and yours for 2010!
Oliver K. Manuel

While in Alaska last year, I caught a full arc rainbow, and ending in a cluster of full fall color birch trees. Looked like the pot o gold, and didn’t even have to pshop it!
http://i110.photobucket.com/albums/n93/kpmailman/P9194377Large.jpg
http://i110.photobucket.com/albums/n93/kpmailman/GoldAtEndofRainbowLarge.jpg

A good meteorological omen, and a great way to start the new year
—————
‘Global Warming….or a Lot of Hot Air’ is on Fox News now. It’s the second time they’ve played it today. Another nice way to start the new year.
They’re going over ClimateGate now. 🙂

Who is the whistler blower that changed the global warming world!?

WUWT ends the old year with heavenly wonder and starts the new with earthly beauty. Thanks and happy new year, Anthony!

A variation on the Alaskan rainbow above, photographed ca. 1967.
http://i817.photobucket.com/albums/zz94/rondewitt/NewYearsgreeting.jpg

Beautiful picture! Years ago we had a full arc double rainbow with hints of a third near the horizon ends. I got enough film shots to piece together a complete view, but in those days the technology didn’t exist to put them together into one image. I haven’t seen the photos for years but it might be time to hunt them up and see if my limited Photoshop skills can manage to put them together.

BTW, did you notice that in the double the color sequence is reversed.

Apparently this year is going to be the hottest year on record, in Australia and the rest of the world:
http://www.news.com.au/national/weather-experts-expect-mercury-to-soar-in-year-ahead/story-e6frfkvr-1225815414199?from=igoogle+gadget+compact+news_rss
I’ll believe that when they can predict the weather in 7 days time correctly!

Almost every complete rainbow–and double rainbows, for that matter–I’ve ever seen have been north of Sacramento in that stretch of the Central Valley before the mountains start. It’s a nice way to start out the new year at the very least, so thanks for sharing.

David Wendt (21:41:02)
Wikipedia has a good explanation of this… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander%27s_band
OT, how do I create italics, underline, make words bold, etc, including the link ‘here’ from the comments section ?
REPLY: [ The link self forms if you just past the hyperlink address in as it appears in your browser (but you do need to have white space on both side. You had a . touching the leading “h” and that confuses the auto form process…)
Other “tags” are used for the other things.

<i> Italics </i>
<b> Bold </b>
<strike> Strike Out </strike>
And you can use "pre" to make a table like this one.

See: http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/html_formatting.asp
for a list of more. Not all of them will work with wordpress, but you can look around and try some things. Different blog hosts will support different sets. “block” for example does indented paragraph quotes.
-mod. ]

and a great way to start the new year
2009 wasn’t too bad for droughts in the US—despite all the noise made about Georgia
Top U.S. weather story of 2009: drought hits a 10-year low
The weather gods were unusually kind to the U.S. in 2009, as the nation had no hurricane landfalls, a relatively quiet tornado season, no billion-dollar floods, and the lowest drought footprint of the decade by year’s end.
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/article.html

Nice shot.
Atmospheric Optics is to website to visit to learn everything you’d want to know about rainbows.
http://www.atoptics.co.uk/bows.htm

So what is the name of the space between secondary and tertiary rainbows? Alexander Jr’s band?

@ Mike McMillan (23:11:59) : You can just leave the “alt” part out if you are not using it, it’s not required.
How did you get the example to show up?

Nice photo.
I live on the South Coast of England. Perfect arcs and double rainbows out at sea are common (when we have rainbows that is)
Presumably that has somehing to do with our high humidity as a country and the additional mosisture from the sea?
tonyb

Happy New Year Anthony. That is a great shot!
Double rainbows are beautiful! With our often low Sun they are not too uncommon over here, like in this shot from my home
http://arnholm.org/astro/atmosphere/rainbows/double_rainbow_20040713.html
Observe that the second, fainter rainbow is inverted.

From: MartinGAtkins
To: Anthony Watts
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in my own data to hide the decline.
http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/hidedecline.png

If you look hard enough, bet you can justsee both pots of gold from your house,

Last summer while driving home from Ft. Collins area to Denver on I-25, we witnessed a full double rainbow. It was right after an afternoon rain burst and the sun light was spilling over the Rocky Mountains and being swallowed up by the dark grey clouds of the thunderheads.
The double bow was nicely highlighted by the dark background.
I saw one guy pulled over taking pictures. I was extremely jealous, as I had left my camera at home.
The scene repeated itself several times down the highway. Must have been at least twenty miles of double rainbows.

wakeupmaggy (21:07:33) : I believe from past discussions you live south of McClure Pass, I live 5 miles north of Carbondale, CO. We have had a nasty December, but it is much worse than any in the past twenty years I’ve lived here. Last, and previous winters were milder so far, and generally, you area is warmer than mine for a given altitude. I’m at 6600′, and had -14°, -15° and -17°F for the coldest mornings, several at 0° to-10°, and only one day that it got above 32° for a high. Below zero mornings in December have been rare, and a few days in the 40s is normal. A rancher in her 70s here has no memory of a winter like this one.
To get on topic, here is a double rainbow I caught here in 2006, I was too close to get it all in a single shot, and blended eight to make this. It was within 1 mile, in the valley between Carbondale and Glenwood Springs looking west.
http://i46.tinypic.com/54cdwl.jpg

Carsten Arnholm, Norway says:

Double rainbows are beautiful! With our often low Sun they are not too uncommon over here, like in this shot from my home
http://arnholm.org/astro/atmosphere/rainbows/double_rainbow_20040713.html

Very nice shot. There, you can really see how it is brighter below the primary rainbow than above it. (I have never really seen a picture where you can clearly see Alexander’s Band because it seems difficult to see the increase in brightness again above the secondary rainbow. That is perhaps not surprising since such a brightness increase comes only from light that has been reflected twice within the drop…which is a fairly small fraction, whereas the increased brightness below the primary rainbow comes from light that has reflected once within the drop.)
Another thing that one can see a bit in your picture next to the primary rainbow (i.e., just below it) are the supernumerary bows. Unlike the primary and secondary bows, the supernumerary bows cannot be understood using the ray picture of light but are in fact a consequence of interference, i.e., the wave nature of light.
John K. Sutherland says:

The dark space is because light is ‘robbed’ from the interspace to produce the two.

I am not sure if this was meant seriously or as a joke but I will just say that this is not the correct explanation. The reason it is darker is that the primary rainbow represents the maximum angle for which light that reflects once within the drop can emerge…So, there is once-reflected light at smaller angles (i.e., below the rainbow) but none above. As for the secondary bow, it represents the MINIMUM angle for which light that reflects twice within the drop can emerge. So, above the secondary bow, you are seeing light that reflected twice within the drop but you are not seeing any such light below it. The Alexander Dark Band is thus the angular region over which neither light reflected once nor light reflected twice within the drop is reaching the observer.

Steve Keohane (07:17:46) :
Hello Steve,
Being a “Show me” chap, I thought Carbondale, that is a “coal valley!” Google maps inform me that the place exists, but are there any coal mines? Ahh haaa! It’s named after http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbondale,_Pennsylvania
I mention this only because I am supping good red wine whilst sitting in front of an open fire, burning coal and toasting crumpets, (it’s an English thing). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crumpets
Naturally, outside it’s brass monkey weather. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1239908/Britains-big-freeze-hit-return-work-forecasters-issue-new-ice-alert-drivers.html
C’est la guerre. Hic!

Nigel S.

Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep:

Good reminder, drawn from:

8 “Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,
9 when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,
10 when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,
11 when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?

Job 38:8-11 NIV
That understanding that laws of nature existed launched the scientific revolution in searching for those laws. It also provided the foundation to establish the USA by appealing to:

the laws for Nature and of Nature’s God.

What a fantastic view, even sans rainbow! They are wonderful phenomena to witness, and I never miss a chance to marvel when I see one. This one is something else! Wow!
Congratulations on securing your own little slice of paradise! I hope you have a New Year which is as successful as the past one has been and, please, keep up the great work!

What hint of a secondary Rainbow are you talking about Anthony ? I’d call that a 2X4 hint in your photograph. Even for my lousy vision, that is a farly prominent secondary, which is usually quite hard to capture.
But did you find the pot of Gold at the end; presumably the end of a secondary, has a pot of coal chunks.