While in the car today I saw weird rainbow clouds when it was 93 degrees on the road. What caused them?

Question

I saw weird clouds today along with a rainbow straight up in the sky, and it was 93 degrees on the ground. It wasn't wet so I don't think it rained, and it wasn't raining when we were driving. I made some observations and wrote them down.

It’s a whispy, blobbly kind of cloud.

Going down, the colors are red on top, orange, yellow, green, blue.

The weird thing is that it’s 2 clouds that are colored, even though there are other whisps around it.

The other cloud from the top to bottom: green, blue on top, then morphing into a light pink color. Now it’s changing to a bright red whisp at the top, orange, yellow, green, blue, and a tiny purplish whisp at the bottom. After a few minutes it’s white at the top, and halfway down it’s red.

The second cloud has lost most of its color and only part of the red is visible at the bottom. Some of the color has moved to the cloud to the side of it. There’s a light blue/yellow/red at the tip.

What caused these strange clouds?

Answer 1

You say two? Were they on opposite sides of the sun and equally spaced from the sun? If so then you saw a sun dog. Sun dogs and rings around the sun (or moon also) are caused by ice crystals high in the atmosphere. If the ice crystals are small then they can assume any orientation and you get a ring, if they are larger then they tend to float kind of like a sheet of paper and you end up with sun dogs (spots on either side of the sun or moon). As to the temperature well I am in southern China right now and was surprised a week or two ago when I spotted a sun dog since it was very hot out. They are probably more common at lower temperatures though I would guess.