‘It was changing colors’: Utah teen snaps photo of iridescent cloud over desert hills
SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — It was the “most amazing weather phenomenon” he’d ever seen.
On Monday, 17-year-old Freedom DePew saw an iridescent cloud, which is sometimes called a “fire rainbow,” changing colors over the desert hills near his home in Hurricane.
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“If I could capture the way it was changing colors, the iridescence … It was phenomenal,” he told ABC4.com.
The sun had just broken through the noontime sky on what had been an otherwise cloudy morning. DePew’s parents first spotted the rainbow-colored cloud and told him he had to see it.
DePew, a photographer who likes to shoot desert landscapes, rushed to take a few pictures with his phone, if only to document the phenomenon.
“It was the first time I really caught something that matters up there,” he said.
As to what it was, DePew thought it was a cirrus cloud or a virga cloud, as both can produce iridescence. And he might well have been right.
Darren Van Cleave, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Salt Lake, viewed the photos and said it appears to be a “circumhorizontal arc,” which is one of several types of optical phenomena that can appear in the sky.
These unusual halos are sometimes called “fire rainbows.”
However, they aren’t technically rainbows, and they have nothing to do with fire, according to the University of California Santa Barbara Department of Geography.
Rather, they appear when the sun is higher than 58 degrees above the horizon and sunlight passes through high-altitude cirrus or cirrostratus clouds made of “hexagonal plate ice crystals.”
Under the right alignment, the ice crystals act like tiny prisms, refracting light and creating a display “reminiscent of a rainbow.”
“They are certainly beautiful and a treat to witness,” Van Cleave said.
For DePew, seeing the colors was breathtaking. He’d never seen anything like it before.
“This is the first time I’d ever witnessed something [like this], and of course it’d be in my beautiful hometown of Hurricane,” he said. “It was an outstanding experience.”
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