Fenland skies

"Look up, and it's amazing what you will find! "

Talk to anyone about Norfolk in general, and the Fens in particular, and sooner or later (after the jokes about 'Terribly flat, Norfolk'), the conversation will turn to the skies -- the huge horizons and the vast over-arching vault of the heavens. For many people, the simple existence of such an uncluttered vision -- free from the ominous overbearing buildings that characterise townscapes -- is enough in itself. But things appear in our skies, and they're more easily observed just because of those open horizons.

The most obvious -- and most frequent -- visitor to the Fenland skies is of course the rainbow. One surprising thing about rainbows is how often people see them, but fail to notice their characteristics.

Rainbows are formed by reflection and refraction in raindrops. You (generally) need the sun behind you, and it is your own personal individual bow that you see. The person next to you is seeing a different one -- more mind-bogglingly, each of your eyes is seeing a separate bow! A rainbow is bright because the precise geometry of the reflections causes rays from the sun to bunch up and create a brighter, circular streak in the sky. The colours are because different wavelengths of light get refracted slightly differently -- in effect, there's a separate streak of light for each colour. One thing that people don't seem to notice is that because the rays bunch up, the presence of a rainbow means that other areas of the sky will necessarily be darker; something that's clearly visible on the left of the photo above, and is even clearer in the picture below..

This second picture shows something else that many of us ignore about rainbows -- multiple ones aren't that rare. Our top photo reveals a hint of a second bow outside the first, but this is clearer in the second photo. The secondary bow is less bright, wider and more diffuse, and has the colours reversed. Multiple bows are in fact always there, but, being weaker, are only visible when the sky is dark. The brightness inside the primary bow compared with the darkness outside is clearly visible in this second picture -- in which it's as well to ignore the rain on the lens! Not really so evident is that the area between the bows is darker than either side -- an area known as Alexander's Dark Band.

The sun produces a variety of other effects in the skies, the rest generally caused by reflections and refractions through ice crystals in the upper atmosphere -- and hence may be seen without the imminence of rain. Halos around the sun are perhaps the commonest of these, but the two photos below (snatched through the windscreen near Marham) show something else.

This is a 'Sun Dog' -- a coloured apparition that appears either side of the sun, about a hand's breadth from it. They're also known as 'false' or 'mock' suns. They're persistent (this example lasted for well over 30 minutes.

Perhaps more dramatic though -- and rather special to the Fens -- is the tornado:

This waterspout coming across the Fens is a truly daunting prospect -- even when no physical damage is caused, the spout picks up peat and rubbish from the fields, which it is prone to deposit where it's least welcome. The forces in the storm mean that this rubbish is apt to be forced through even the narrowest and tightest of openings. The picture below on the left (hardly a work of art) is a case in point. It's the result of arriving home very late at night (in fact after a 24-hour round trip to Turkey to see the March 2006 solar veclipse) and getting up barefoot without true awareness of what had happened in the Fens while we were away!



But our last photograph is perhaps the reason why most of us look to the skies -- the stunning sunsets that we experience, often with even less obstruction than a well-placed tree!