You don’t have to be an angel to have a halo. The halo I’m talking about is the ring around the sun or moon. You may not have noticed as you go about your Earthly affairs, because you tend to not look up much. Look up, in the sky, unless you are driving. You’ll spot things that can provide a moment of Zen or wonderment that leads to stress relief or inspiration.
Just two weeks ago, a lady posted on my Facebook page that she was 42 years old and had never seen a halo until that day. She was excited. A halo is a ring in the high, thin clouds around the sun or the moon. Around the sun, it’s called a solar halo. Around the moon, it’s a lunar halo. Each halo forms when light strikes and passes through the ice crystals of a sheet of cirrus clouds. Cirrus clouds are the highest, coldest clouds. The ice crystals cause the light to bend at a specific angle, creating a ring around the sun or moon.
Shielding your eyes from the sun, look closely at a solar halo and you’ll sometimes notice the same seven colors you see in a rainbow. Some people confuse haloes with rainbows, but rainbows form only when the sun is low and the rain is in the direction of your shadow. Haloes form around the sun, when it is not raining. In the arc of a rainbow, red is on the outside. In the circle of a halo, red is on the inside.
For centuries, haloes have been used to forecast weather, although not accurately. Folklore holds that a ring around the sun or moon foretells precipitation within two days. That would be rain in warm regions and snow in cold areas. The science behind that is when weather systems move from west to east, typically the highest clouds arrive as emissary clouds, in advance of the storm. On the Gulf Coast, we have summer weather moving from east to west, and sometimes that includes a tropical storm or hurricane, which also can send halo-producing cirrus clouds in advance. What really throws the folklore off now is that jet airplane traffic commonly produces vapor trails that become cirrus clouds, which increase the frequency of haloes, when no weather system is approaching.
Here's an old-school way to trace out the location of a halo: Extend either arm outward to the sun or moon. Then extend your pinky and thumb outward, while curling the other three fingers inward, in the surfer dude “shaka” symbol, like that used by Hangout Music Fest. Cover the sun or moon with your thumb and see that your pinky will trace the circle of a halo.
If you watch me on TV and all of this sounds familiar, it’s because a halo has a ring to it.
Alan Sealls is Chief Meteorologist at NBC 15 in Mobile. He has more than a dozen Emmy awards, along with multiple Lagniappe Nappie awards for best meteorologist. Alan went viral on YouTube for coverage of Hurricane Irma, in 2017. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in meteorology from Cornell, and from FSU, respectively. Alan is a Past President of the National Weather Association, and a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. He teaches weather broadcasting at the University of South Alabama, and writes the Weather Things column for Lagniappe Newspaper. Before Mobile, Alan worked in Milwaukee, and Chicago.
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