Over the past several days many of our viewers have been snapping pictures of the rain that we’ve been seeing. It’s been such a long time since we’ve had rain, everyone seems to be pretty excited about it. Yesterday we received several pictures of rainbows that had formed after a ban of showers had moved through.
I thought that you might like a little history on the phenomenon we call A RAINBOW. After a good rain shower there are many, many tiny water droplets that are left behind in the atmosphere. When the sun shines bright after that rain shower, light from the Sun shines on a water droplet and penetrates the outer boundary of the droplet. As the light enters, it is bent or refracted and scattered into the familiar band of colors we like to call a rainbow. These colors are then reflected from off the back of the drop again as they pass through the front of the drop once more.
The continuous band of colors we see is due to the bending of light. Each color of light is determined by the degree to which it is bent due to its wavelength. The longest wavelengths of light are on the red end of the spectrum and those are bent the most while and the shortest wavelengths are on the violet end of the spectrum and they are bent the least.
You will always see the colors of a rainbow in the following order from the outside in: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and then violet. As I mentioned, red – being the longest wavelength, has the most refraction while violet is the shortest wavelength and has the least bend.
Now how the pot of gold ends up at the end of the rainbow – that is an entirely different story. 
Have a great day.
Laura Huckabee / Meteorologist
