A study by researchers at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa (UH) has found that climate change will increase the likelihood of seeing rainbows.
The study’s authors forecast that at the typical geographical location on Earth, there will be 5% more days with rainbows by 2100 than there were at the start of the twenty-first century.
The northern latitudes and extremely high elevations, where warming is anticipated to lead to less snow and more rain, will experience the largest increases in rainbow occurrence. But fewer rainbow days are anticipated in areas with less precipitation due to climate change, including the Mediterranean.
When sunlight is refracted by water droplets, rainbows result. Rainbows consequently require both sunlight and precipitation. By warming the climate through human activities like burning fossil fuels, patterns and volumes of rainfall and cloud cover are changed.
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“Living in Hawai‘i, I felt grateful that stunning, ephemeral rainbows were a part of my daily life,” said the lead author of the study, Kimberly Carlson, who is now at New York University’s Department of Environmental Studies. “I wondered how climate change might affect such rainbow-viewing opportunities.”
Camilo Mora of the UH Manoa Geography and Environment department became interested in the topic and proposed it as the theme of a thesis for one of his graduate classes.
According to Mora, “We often study how climate change directly affects people’s health and livelihoods, for instance via the occurrence of heat stroke during climate change-enhanced heat waves.”
However, few studies have looked at how environmental aesthetics may be impacted by climate change, and no one has attempted to map rainbow occurrences, much less in the context of climate change.
This story was adapted from SciTechDaily.
