It would be such an amazing holiday, I can't even express in words. And of course as I was thinking about Christmas, some great memories came to my mind about having beautiful, virgin snow around the city while we went caroling. Oh those were the best days ever. And now that this topic came up, I made a grand list about rare natural phenomena. I hope you guys enjoy these!
1. Fire Rainbow
To name it properly, a fire rainbow is a circumhorizontal arc. It is given its name because it looks as if a rainbow has spontaneously combusted as it made its way across the sky. Although it looks like a rainbow on fire, this phenomenon is as cold as ice. It is caused by light passing through wispy, high-altitude cirrus clouds. What's more, the hexagonal ice crystals that make up cirrus clouds must be shaped like thick plates with their faces parallel to the ground. It is the 90 degrees inclination that produces the well-separated, rainbow-like colors and, if the crystal alignment is just right, makes the entire cirrus cloud shine like a flaming rainbow. 2. Waterspout
I'm sure everyone has seen some great cartoons about elemental superheroes spurting tornadoes at their enemies. A waterspout is actually a really intense columnar vortex that takes place over a mass of water and links it to a cumuli-form cloud. Though they are definitely weaker than tornadoes, some of them are huge, and bring the water upward with huge speed and power. 3. Moonbows
Oh there seem to be so many kinds of rainbows, it's amazing. A moonbow, also known as a lunar rainbow, white rainbow, lunar bow or space rainbow, is a rainbow produced by light reflected off the surface of the moon rather than from direct sunlight. It is difficult for the human eye to discern colors in a moonbow because the light is usually too faint to excite the cone color receptors in human eyes. As a result, they often appear to be white. However, the colors in a moonbow do appear in long exposure photographs. For a moonbow a bright moon near to full is needed,and it must be raining opposite the moon. The sky must be dark and the moon must be less than 42º high. Put all these together and you do not get to see a moonbow very often!4. Sea foam
"It was as if someone had poured tons of coffee and milk into the ocean, then switched on a giant blender. Suddenly the shoreline north of Sydney were transformed into the Cappuccino Coast.
Foam swallowed an entire beach and half the nearby buildings, including the local lifeguards' center, in a freak display of nature at Yamba in New South Wales.
One minute a group of teenage surfers were waiting to catch a wave, the next they were swallowed up in a giant bubble bath. The foam was so light that they could puff it out of their hands and watch it float away." (Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-478041/Cappuccino-Coast-The-day-Pacific-whipped-ocean-froth.html#ixzz1da9gnnMu)Apparently this thick foam in the ocean appears when salt water interacts with the decomposition products of underwater living creatures, and everything is churned up together by powerful currents which cause the water to form bubbles.
5. Frozen waves
This phenomenon occurs in the Antarctic region. The main cause of this frozen wave is reaction between the snow conditions in Antarctica. For example, when a mountain of ice that fell into the sea it will cause a wave, that wave will react with snow and produce frozen waves. If icebergs falling into the sea bring algae, then the wave is formed will have color lines like green, brown, black and yellow.6. Giant snowflakes
An individual snow crystal has 6 sides and is very small. A snowflake is composed of several of these 6 sided crystals.In a heavy wet snow situation in which the winds are light, snowflakes can grow to silver dollar size diameter or larger. This situation can look like little snowballs falling from the sky. Light wind prevents the snowflakes from breaking into pieces and the liquid film around each snowflake helps them stick and accrete to surrounding snowflakes as they fall.7. Fire Whirls
If there are water tornadoes, there can certainly be fire ones too. A fire whirl, also known as fire devil or fire tornado, is a rare phenomenon in which a fire, under certain conditions --depending on air temperature and currents--, acquires a vertical vorticity and forms a whirl, or a tornado-like effect of a vertically oriented rotating column of air. Fire whirls often occur during bush fires. Vertical rotating columns of fire form when the air currents and temperature are just right, creating a tornado-like effect. They can be as high as 30 to 200 ft tall and up to 10 ft wide but only last a few minutes, although some can last for longer if the winds are strong. 8. Light pillars
A light pillar is a visual phenomenon created by the reflection of light from ice crystals with near horizontal parallel planar surfaces. The light can come from the sun (usually at or low to the horizon) in which case the phenomenon is called a sun pillar or solar pillar. It can also come from the moon or from terrestrial sources such as streetlights.9. Ice circles
While many see these apparently perfect ice circles as worthy of conspiracy theorizing, scientists generally accept that they are formed by eddies in the water that spin a sizable piece of ice in a circular motion. As a result of this rotation, other pieces of ice and flotsam wear relatively evenly at the edges of the ice until it slowly forms into an essentially ideal circle. Ice circles have been seen with diameters of over 500 feet and can also at times be found in clusters and groups at different sizes. 10. Mammatus clouds
Mammatus clouds are often harbingers of a coming storm or other extreme weather system. Typically composed primarily of ice, they can extend for hundreds of miles in each direction and individual formations can remain visibly static for ten to fifteen minutes at a time. While they may appear foreboding they are merely the messengers – appearing around, before or even after severe weather.
