Not expecting any precipitation this morning, lucky folks in the northeast Boston area were treated to a beautiful sight around 8am as the sun came up over the horizon. Almost a complete primary rainbow with pieces of a secondary bow (just to the left of the “do not enter” sign).
It wasn’t raining at the surface, but the air
was full of water droplets both from the low level fog and mist. There was also rain going on in the layers of clouds above us, causing this refraction as the sun rose above the horizon. To the right, we can see a radar image from this morning. It may look like a line of storms came through, but most of this precipitation did not reach the ground! The areas of yellow (which show stronger precipitation signatures and usually mean heavier rain) were actually a feature called bright-banding! The radar beams were reflecting off of the ice crystals in the clouds, causing the beams to tell the radar that there was heavier precip there, when it was really just ice! This all played a factor into why we saw no precipitation, but were treated to a beauti