Quadruple Rainbow: How the Phenomenon Happens
— -- April showers created a gloomy Monday for most of the New York City area, but this morning, the sun came out -- along with a quadruple rainbow!
Amanda Curtis spotted the magnificent phenomenon from the Long Island Rail Road station in Glencove today.
She snapped the rare photo and posted it to her Twitter, saying in part, "Today will be 4 pots of #gold #lucky."
While the primary rainbow is formed by direct sunlight passing through raindrops at a proper angle, the other three rainbows are formed by reflections of the sun, usually from calm water, according to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
These other rainbows are known as reflection rainbows.
"The reflected rainbow may be considered as a combination of two rainbows produced by sunlight coming from two different directions - one directly from the sun, the other from the reflected image of the sun," the NCAR says. "The angles are quite different and therefore the elevation of the rainbow arcs will be correspondingly different."
Double and single rainbows were captured throughout other parts of the New York area and shared on social media as well.
