Rainbow forecast for Cape Town
Cape Town, South Africa: live rainbow odds for today, the best hour to look up, and the week ahead.
Rainbow weather in Cape Town
Cape Town sees its rainbows with changeable, showery weather: spring and autumn cold fronts, summer thunderstorms that clear near evening. Bows here reward attention: they follow the app's classic pattern of rain ending while low sun breaks through.
Wherever you are, the rules are the same: a rainbow forms opposite the sun, only while the sun is less than 42 degrees above the horizon, and most often in the minutes after a shower moves through. The gauge above runs those rules against live ensemble forecasts for the 12 km around Cape Town.
Rainbow questions, answered
- When do rainbows appear in Cape Town?
- Rainbows need sunlit rain with the sun lower than 42 degrees, so in Cape Town the best windows are the hours after sunrise and before sunset on showery days. Around nine in ten rainbows appear in the hour right after rain stops.
- Where should I look for a rainbow in Cape Town?
- Always directly opposite the sun: put the sun at your back and look toward the retreating rain. In the evening that means looking east; in the morning, west.
- What is the rainbow chance in Cape Town today?
- Bowcast computes it live from ensemble weather models: about 40 forecast runs are checked for sunlit-rain conditions around Cape Town, hour by hour, for the next 7 days. The live figure is on this page and on the map.
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