AMELIA COUNTY, Va. -- Rainbows are pretty. Clouds are pretty. Rainbow clouds? So pretty! When Toni Zimmermann in Amelia spotted rainbow colors in the sky while driving along Route 360, she stopped and snapped a few photos.
“Awesome rainbow clouds!” she wrote in an email sent to the newsroom.
The “rainbow clouds” are actually called circumhorizontal arcs.
“Essentially it’s sunlight coming through these high-level clouds, these cirrostratus clouds which are made of ice crystals,” WTVR CBS 6 meteorologist Mike Stone explained. “The sunlight gets diffracted, and when it does that, it actually looks like a little rainbow in the sky.”
Stone said circumhorizontal arcs occur most often in the late spring and summer as the sun angle gets higher.
