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Podcast is all about your weather-wunderings, and, of course, you can always email us your questions to weatheredquestions at gmail.com to join in on the conversation.
Meteorologist Kyle Merrick here with meteorologist Jan Reinhardt.
We're going to get right into it, Jan, because I understand we had a rainbow sighting last week, and it wasn't raining.
Yeah, it's a it's a rainbow, but not a rainbow, right?
Yeah.
So yeah, today's first question came in via a text message to me personally, where one of my family members said, why the random rainbow?
What's going on here with a picture of a beautiful sunny sky, some blue clouds, blue sky, white clouds.
I know what you meant.
Yeah.
I got you.
And in a tiny little rainbow,
sideways next to the sun.
So what that is, it is not a true rainbow or at least doesn't form in the exact same way as our traditional rainbows, but it has the same physics, the same principles.
What that is, it's a sun dog.
And a lot of us maybe have heard of sun dogs or have seen them in certain contexts, but maybe not on a nice fall afternoon.
A lot of times they show up in the winter time.
And the reason for that is because our sun dogs
are formed off of ice crystals that are very high up in the sky.
Obviously, those become a little bit more common as you get into the colder months.
But we do have those ice crystals overhead all the time, especially for us in the mid-latitudes across much of the US.
So all that was, it was basically those ice crystals high up in the atmosphere.
acting in the same way that those raindrops would act to create our rainbows normally.
And that creates a little mini sideways rainbow to the side of the sun.
Sun dogs come in pairs.
Maybe you can't always see the other pair depending on where you are.
if you have a building or a tree or something obstructing your view, or if there's more clouds on one side of the sky versus the other, you may not always be able to see that second sun dog, but they do come in pairs on exact opposite sides of the sun.
And I think that's actually kind of why they're called sun dogs is they kind of follow the sun like a little dog would follow their human, their master around.
So yeah, that's what's going on there.
That's why you saw
maybe some mini random rainbows here over the last short while.
And again, they'll probably become more and more common as we head through the winter months.
And I feel like I always associate them with like a cold, you know, January afternoon, where we've just got, you know, really, really cold weather and nothing else happening, just blue sky overhead, but just a couple of little sun dogs that just pop up out of.
out of nowhere in the evening hours or something like that.
That's my traditional sun dog picture in my head at least.
Yeah, and it's exactly as you mentioned with the cirrus clouds because even if we have 100 degrees on the ground, the cirrus clouds are made of ice.
And in that case, cumulus clouds closer to the ground are probably made up of water drops because of how warm it is.
But in the winter months, they're all made of ice or super cool water.
So you kind of have more targets for the sun to hit.
And to your point being kind of early in the day or late in the day did this person message you Jan?
Did they say it was later in the day?
Let's see 508 p.m.
Is when I there you go
that's within about an hour hour and a half sunset Yeah, so yeah, the Sun is low the beam is having to scatter through a whole lot of atmosphere It's being refracted around and yeah, some of the old articles online do suggest that
Um, sun dog is named that because of dogs following you.
Um, I mean, the textbook version is I guess a sun halo, but at the same time, you don't see the whole halo.
You just see the burst of light that's there.
And sometimes they'll last for a couple of seconds, but at the times they'll be really persistent.
Now the other thing about this, if I remember right.
You could also get these kind of unclear sky mornings in super super super cold environments like 20 below zero Just because ice crystals are hanging in the air Yeah, and it's enough to just bend the light and have those maximum on either side.
It's pretty
cool Yeah, and that's like the classic like when I think of a sun dog like in that that cold January, you know polar vortex II afternoon kind of thing That's that's where I picture it, but they can absolutely happen at other times of the year
as an example just
last week.
Yeah.
Well, and for what you just said with some high clouds in the area, I'm going to get you into your next one because we had another one going on.
I saw some high clouds that almost look like they were shrinking up and away from Earth.
What was going on with that?
Yeah.
So this is another one coming in here in the recent past.
So I think what's going on here
is basically just that you have dry air and your clouds are essentially kind of the air on the outside of those clouds is kind of eating away the edges of those where you have more saturated air maybe in that middle of that cloud bank as it were.
And so the middle part appears to kind of stay the same, but the
Edges of those clouds appear to almost be kind of dissolving just into the atmosphere That's that's my best guess for what's going on here.
I don't know if you have other ideas with that one Kai
Do you know where this person was looking were they looking in the same direction the cloud is moving by chance?
No,
okay, because I wonder if it's as simple as the clouds moving away and Because the earth is curved
It has a bit of a different angle on it as it keeps moving, moving, moving, moving, moving away from you.
It looks a little bit different as it's going away.
Now, it could take a while for serious clouds to move away and out of your view.
I would assume that if this person's talking about high clouds, it's probably the type of cloud they were looking at.
But if it was shrinking up and away, there's probably some refraction and illusion tricks going on too.
Yeah.
Just from the curvature of the earth.
I know that I was at a soccer game.
About a week and a half ago And there was a jet contrail that almost had the appearance of a rocket ship, but it was going up and away from our area and You know people were on the sidelines My god, they're shooting rockets.
They're not it kind of looks like they are but there's no rockets going up.
It was just
the way that these contrails were curved, the plane was going away from us perfectly.
So it looked like it was up because the tail end was closer to us and the far end was way far away.
So I'm wondering if curvature is playing a role here with what this person might be asking about.
That's my guess.
It's probably a combination of all of it, right?
Yeah.
At least to some extent.
Because I mean, when planes take off from the ground, they shrink.
And they go up in a way, but we all know being in a plane that nothing actually shrunk.
Or maybe an optical illusion.
Maybe.
Well, OK.
So this would be, there's another one here.
I wonder if the cloud base was going up.
Because if the cloud base was increasing,
and maybe the bottom of the cloud was eroding for some reason, and the top
was
maintaining, then it would give that appearance of going up and away at that point.
That's a good point.
But it would depend on time of day.
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense in near the nighttime hours, but maybe during the midday hours, something
is getting
mixed up, and the low clouds are dissipating, and the high clouds are remaining.
And it looks like they're going up and away, but they're really not.
Yeah, they're just kind of the outsides of that, or that quote unquote outside.
is lower and the middle part is higher up.
That's one I don't think that there's possibly a fully right answer for.
Just
a good discussion.
Absolutely.
That's what we're here for, right?
But yeah, without having all of the details or the exact sounding of when and where that was, it's tough to fully speculate.
But well, we can speculate as much as we want.
It's tough to draw firm conclusion, I guess.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I agree.
So that's interesting.
That's always good stuff, though, that people are at least looking and observing and trying to figure out why things are doing what they're what they're doing.
Yeah, which sometimes it's easy to explain.
Other times there might be a couple different factors at play here.
So
yeah, that's that's exactly why we're here.
If you if you see something that you're like, huh, that's weird.
That's interesting.
Let us know about it.
We'd love to love to talk about it and speculate on your weathered question.
And maybe not even get it right, but at least try and discuss it.
And then you'll feel better about yourself like, all right, leaving these guys that have done this for a long time may not fully know without seeing additional context what's going on here.
So usually pictures are helpful.
If anybody has questions that they want to submit, if there's a picture with it, that helps us a lot.
Yeah, which gets tricky on the podcast platform versus the TV platform.
Kai and I are so familiar with, but we can explain.
It's like charades, reverse-pictionary.
We'll describe your picture to everybody listening.
Oh, yeah.
And then hopefully we're right.
And then everybody visualizes it and goes, oh my gosh, that was the worst description you could have possibly made.
All right.
Should we get into our next question, Kai?
Sure.
Let's go for it.
All right.
So why can we get such big temperature swings in fall?
Why does that always happen?
What's going on?
So part of this could be a function of daylight, but it's also a function of we're starting to get some colder, polar air finally.
And not just polar air, but stuff that's actually in Canada that's a little bit cooler now.
And so in the fall season, we get pieces of that that try and rotate down to our area.
And then we still have plenty of warmth going on.
A lot of people don't realize this, but
portions of Texas and Louisiana get some of their warmest air in September.
So that part of the country stays hot for a while, even going into early and even mid-fall.
It can be really toasty down there in that part of the country.
Meanwhile, you've got different temperature air masses going on to the north.
And the way that this operates, it sounds almost a little bit backwards because we think about huge domes of heat, right, during heat waves.
colder air is actually more dense and we know that if you have a basement in your house and Let's just say for a week.
I wouldn't recommend doing this experiment.
Maybe you can do it for a day And maybe it's a maybe it's a high of 65 so it's comfortable somewhat Turn your AC and your heat off entirely If you got a basement you can open the windows, that's cool
But then go downstairs about eight or nine o'clock at night when we've been dark for three or four hours and the temperatures outside are in the 40s and 50s and Compare the temperature of your ceiling to the temperature of the basement floor Same air mass, but the colder air molecules are going to settle lower.
They're more dense.
They weigh more So when this air that's colder and more dense from the north gets to moving
It's like a big bowling ball.
Can't really stop it.
And it's not like it takes a lot of difference, right?
It could be 40s versus 70s.
It's not like that's even really, in my opinion, really getting into winter coat territory.
But from a physical standpoint, it's enough.
There's enough of a difference there.
It's going to move.
And we call these long waves and short waves, and they're naturally occurring things on our planet.
and the temperature go up and it goes down and it goes up and it goes down.
And as the wave comes in, if you're on the eastern side of the wave, that's where the winds are out of the south and things are still pretty mild on the backside of the wave, it gets cooler for a few days and then it resets.
And typically, especially in October, November, you get a lot of these waves that come through that do this.
If you get a really big temperature swing, you get what we call a high amplitude wave.
And that means we have to go back to our high school science class and draw the wave.
And a great example of this is an ocean wave.
If you have a very small little ocean wave, maybe it's only a foot tall and it laps at you at the side of the shore.
That's something fun that kids would play at.
What if you get a three foot wave?
A little bit bigger.
Adults are probably digging the three foot wave.
Infants, not so much.
So the ceiling or the height is actually higher.
And as we're using waves as an example, the amplitude is higher.
So meteorologists will refer to these as high amplitude waves, meaning the wave in the front is really high and the dip in the back is really low.
And that's where you get highs in the 70s and then the next morning it's snowing.
That's that's a big temperature swing in the fall.
I will say, though, granted, this fall has been an anomaly and that we really haven't had that yet, not here.
Yeah.
So I think that's the best way to give a good analogy as to why these temperature swings happen in the fall.
It's really because you've got leftover summer and winter trying to intrude.
You'll see a little bit less of this in December, though, as I say that, I remember December of 2021 vividly.
where we actually had a derecho come through in the middle of the month.
So
it can happen.
If waves are screwed up enough, then it can happen.
Maybe January and February are safer bets.
But even there, the waves are an actual part of nature.
And so the higher amplitude waves are the ones that create more excitement.
The shallow ones are typically, eh, we have more clouds than forecast.
That's not good for a temperature forecast, but it didn't really change anyone's day.
if that makes sense.
So that's my best way to kind of visualize all that for folks.
Yeah, I think you did an excellent job kind of explaining the waves and the difference in that like, you know, the bigger that wave is, the bigger the difference is between the highs and the lows, which literally translates to
our highs and our lows in terms of temperature, which also incorporates the more active weather.
Maybe that can come along with that in terms of precipitation, in terms of wind, in terms of all of that.
But I think another thing to keep in mind here is, especially across the Midwest, but everyone gets this during the summer months.
you have very humid air during the summer, a lot more moisture, whereas as you're going into those winter months, things start to dry out, and arid air or drier air is a lot easier to change that temperature as well.
And so that also kind of plays into it where that
layer of humidity that we have during the summer almost kind of protects us a little bit from those bigger temperature swings because it's harder to change the temperature of water and all that water in the air makes it harder to have those big variances whereas as you head into those fall months you have less less air kind of or less moisture buffering that temperature change and so it's a lot easier to go from the the really high highs to the really low lows in that
kind of shorter period of time.
Yeah.
Well, and speaking of high highs and low lows, you know, we talked about, we've talked about holidays on this program before, mainly just surrounding the time that we released the episode close to the holiday.
But if you think about the predictability of weather around holidays, there are some that have a whole lot of variability and others that don't have as much.
Here's a great example.
Independence Day, July 4th.
Unless it's raining, unless it's raining, there's a really good chance you're going to be in t-shirts and shorts and have bug spray on, at least in the Midwest.
Not always, but I'd say greater than 90% unless it's raining.
Christmas time.
And even then, you might still.
Right, you might still.
Christmas time, New Year's time.
We tend to expect it to be quite cold.
You bring in Easter, St.
Patrick's Day, and Halloween, and stuff starts getting weird because those are all in what we call transition months, which are the waves we're talking about.
And just to give you a little bit of an indicator as to how much it can vary.
So this week is obviously Halloween week, so that's coming up on Saturday.
So for folks that like to go out and do that kind of stuff, the weather does play a role in that.
Precipitation aside, the temperature plays a huge role in what you want.
And even if you don't do anything with the holiday, you know, I'm going to discuss it anyway, because for those two hours, kids are going to be out real thick.
So you want to just be very careful with that.
But to give you some sign of variability, we're not sure what 2026 will bring yet.
Probably warmer than normal if I had to take a guess at it at this distance.
Yep.
We'll have more in the next episode about how far out we can actually do this kind of stuff.
But for Halloween in 2025 at Cedar Rapids, Jan, it was 53 degrees.
In Halloween of 24, it was 61 degrees.
In 2023, it was 37.
And then in 2022, it was 66.
Yeah.
And the problem is there's not a whole lot of good ways to tell that.
until you're about a week away.
And a lot of people have already tried to figure out what the costumes are gonna be by this time.
So it does get interesting.
And I agree, if you're gonna go out and you have a great costume on and you have to put a winter coat over it, it sucks.
That's the worst.
It's a waste, it sucks.
You don't like that, I get it.
Or on the flip side, there's those years that you're like, I'm gonna outsmart with the weather.
I'm gonna have, I'm gonna go as a, you know,
Arctic Explorer, and then it's 70 degrees.
Here's my cold weather just in case.
Here's the costume I really want.
And then if you're an adult especially, and it doesn't change year to year, you're not growing like kids do, then you can just save it in the closet for next year
if you
want to.
That's a good economical way to do it.
But anyway, it's the long waves.
That's why we get such big temperature swings in the fall, and the data proves it.
Thanksgiving gets even weirder.
So
Best Halloween costume you ever wore Kai go
my mom made it for me I'll never forget it.
She made it.
It would have been kindergarten or first grade black sweatpants black sweatshirt and She made me a skeleton and what she did was she cut out all the bones out of felt and put them on the costume I still have it in the basement right now
Amazing.
And even though that was a very fast answer, I promise you we did not prepare to talk about costumes that came
out that
quickly.
That is
by far the coolest costume I've ever seen and I've ever worn and I still have it.
I don't think I can fit it anymore.
I was a big kid first grade, but I still have it.
It's very cool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I remember this one was a very recent one because we did it for one of the Halloween parades that we were in.
when we were working in TV still, I got to be a tornado.
That was really fun.
Yeah.
Yes.
That was sweet.
That was very cool.
But my mom also made that one.
But I think one of the childhood ones that I remember most was, again, my mom made it.
I got to be Pooh Bear.
And I loved that costume.
That's great.
My oldest daughter has got an Eeyore costume.
It's pretty awesome.
She's going to hand out candy this year, she decided,
which
was a surprise to me because she's been going out with friends the last several.
And now I think she's realized that, OK, maybe I'm now that I'm in driver's ed.
Maybe I should stop going around and doing this.
Maybe I should be the one to hand out candy, which kind
of gives
us a little more freedom than we've never had.
True.
Now we can all go and she can just stay here.
Yeah, so why I mean why do the work of going and collecting candy when you can just eat the candy that mom and dad already bought?
All right.
It's already there She's gonna have leftovers and then she can she can enjoy you know handing things out to kids that come by and then and this this sounds kind of weird too You know kids might be more apt and more comfortable to get candy from other kids
as
opposed to from you know huge tall adults like me
Yeah,
so if you got a teenager greeting you with a smile and giving you you know
Oh, Henry bars and crunch bars.
It's like, Hey, that's that's a good gig.
Oh, Henry bars.
Still a thing.
Are they?
I
don't
know.
The company still exists.
Who knows?
Well, we'll answer that question next time.
We haven't done the research on that one.
Let's see.
Are you looking it up?
Yes.
All right.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
So if you have any old Henry bars, throw them out there from 2019.
If you have any still in your bag.
Make sure those hit the trash because yeah, they Google said they stopped making them in 2019.
So
don't accept those from the random trick or treat house.
Definitely misspoke on that
one.
It's all right.
Make sure it's a
Hershey bar.
All right.
Well, to wrap up today's show, we're going to take a little trip into folklore land, couple topical things that are maybe on the mind right now.
I found this.
phrase I guess we'll call it this folklore phrase in two different ways one is Cold is the night when the stars shine bright And the other I like that one because it rhymes better the other one is when the stars are in number It's a sign are many in number.
It's a sign of colder weather so two little bits of folklore that you know have carried through signs of cold weather to come but Kai do you have any insight into maybe
some of the science behind this.
I know I have some ideas of maybe why these would have carried through, but what the many stars or the stars shining bright would mean about colder weather?
Well, first, I'm going to assume that because the stars are out, we're talking about nighttime.
That's going to be my guess.
Probably.
And number two, I just think it comes around to the fact that clear sky at night, you don't have anything holding your radiation in and you tend to cool down more effectively.
So that's
the only
way I see it working out.
Yeah.
You kind of similar, like we talked about that like layer of humidity that you have in the summer months, right?
There's more humidity.
It tends to be a little easier almost during those summer months.
Even if you just look at the sky during the daytime, the winter blue versus the summer blue is different.
Yeah.
The winter one is definitely crisper versus
the
summer.
Yeah, it's more, it's more true, like that azure color, whereas in the winter, in the summer months, it's kind of that milky haze that kind of mixes in with the sky.
And so that's kind of what's happening here, where you can see the the stars, the nighttime sky a little bit more clearer, because you don't maybe have that that extra humidity, that extra layer of cloud cover in in the way, I guess, is ultimately what it comes down to.
Well, and so to dive in a little bit more before we wrap here Yeah, there's there's a term in what you just said for the second version of this.
So cold is the night when the stars shine bright So that might lead us into a winter's night as opposed to a summer's night based on what you just said So that second one cold is the night when the stars shine bright not just the stars shine or many a number
But when they're really bright, now you are clear from the surface of the Earth all the way out to space.
You don't have that extra garbage in the air from summer, and you've just got a clear, cold air mass.
So I'm going to say, yeah, this is a wintertime folklore, and it's cold when the sky is clear and the stars shine bright.
That's my final answer.
Final answer.
You heard your first.
That's it.
But I picked
that keyword bright after I looked at it again.
And after what you just said, I think that connects the dots that this is even more so in the wintertime.
You can get cool nights in the summer, but this is more in the wintertime realm.
And I would agree with that, by the way, 100%.
Yeah,
I think so.
And I think it's kind of fun to be able to dive into these folklore things that have been carried around for decades or centuries or however long.
is some science behind it or some reasoning behind it of why those things actually happen, even still fitting with today's modern science
world.
Absolutely.
I agree with you.
Good stuff, Jan.
All right.
Well, that brings us to the end of another episode.
Thanks so much for joining along with us here.
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