Since moving to west Sheffield in January 2024, I feel like I’ve seen more rainbows than in the rest of my life put together. No doubt there’s an element of confirmation bias at play, but I think it’s also about local weather and geography.
Our house is 170 metres above sea level on the side of a big hill, creating views to the north and east. It’s also a lot wetter here than where we used to live. As I understand it (using that word loosely), wet air from the west is forced up over the Pennines, over our heads, and condenses as rain to our north/east. When the rain’s followed by sun, we see a rainbow.
In an effort to understand the science a bit better, I’ve started collecting all our rainbow photos in one place. Click each one to see a little mini-map showing the supposed location of the rainbow if it was a solid object, based on the camera position, sun angle and elevation data from Open-Meteo. It should update automatically when we see another one.
