Sun and rain together — is it pineapple juice?
Some just call it a sun shower. Others say the devils are getting married — or the rats, or the foxes are having a wedding. In some places, a hyena is giving birth or there’s a hole in the heavens. And although unnerving, some casually remark that the devil is beating his wife. These are a few ways people around the world have described the phenomenon of rain falling at the same time the sun is shining.
You won’t find any of these terms in the American Meteorological Society’s Glossary of Meteorology, but there’s always a place somewhere on this planet where you can stumble upon this magical weather paradox. As summer officially begins, full of sunshine and thunderstorms, let’s take a moment to appreciate the science behind these sun showers, even if they don’t make much of an im- pression on meteorologists.
“I’m not a fan of the term,” Gary Lackmann, an atmospheric scientist at North Carolina State University, wrote in an email. He added, “Sun showers are really just rain showers that take place with partly cloudy or broken cloud conditions, and they can occur in a few different ways.”
Often you’ll spot them when the atmosphere around you is, in meteorological terms, unstable — which is more likely during the spring and summer. In this condition, temperature variations encourage columns of air to move vertically, rising rapidly in some places and sinking in others. In the rising columns, the air cools, condensing moisture within it and allowing clouds and showers to develop. But the air in the sinking columns suppresses clouds, creating areas of clear skies between showers.
But you won’t see them if the sun is straight overhead. Your chances to catch the magic are greater when the sun is low on the horizon, like the midmorning or the midafternoon, or when a shower moves east.
At those moments, the angle of the sun allows it to shine beneath the rain clouds.
“This is also a good recipe for rainbows,” Lackmann said.
“That’s something you see happen in the tropics or when the rain is blowing and pushing the rain out from under the cloud,” Lackmann said.
In Hawaii, sun showers are known as pukalani, or pineapple juice. Pukalani, also the name of a rainy town, means “hole in the sky.” You can even find forecasts for sun showers in its weather report.