Have you ever seen a double rainbow? I could probably count on one hand the number of double rainbows I’ve seen. So, when I do see one, I consider it a double blessing.
One morning we were fortunate to see this double rainbow from our lanai at the Turtle Bay Resort on Oahu’s North Shore.
I recently ran across these facts about double rainbows that I wanted to share with you. They are from my local my local weatherman.
- A secondary rainbow is not especially uncommon.
- The secondary rainbow is cause by one extra reflection of sunlight within the raindrops.
- Since the double rainbow is only about 30 or 40 percent as bright as the primary bow, the secondary bow may go unnoticed when the primary bow is fairly dim.
- The order of colors is reversed in the secondary bow.
Have you seen a double rainbow or a triple rainbow? If so, did you see it in Hawaii or somewhere else?
Sheila Beal
3 comments
I live in Hawaii now so I see them all the time but I still can’t over the sight of a good rainbow because they were so rare when I was a kid growing up in New Mexico.
Every few years there would be a decent rainbow and the reaction would be something like… “OMG! – Get the camera! – Wake the neighbors!”
The weather here is kind of strange… It “rains” almost every day but it’s more like sprinkling or misting than raining.
I’m not a meteorologist but it seems like small clouds from the mountain produce very isolated pockets of rain so the sky is mostly sunny & perfect for producing astonishingly beautiful rainbows almost every day.
Once I was in a very heavy shower of “Mist” on a very sunny day and I saw a super bright, double-rainbow that formed an almost complete circle right in front of me. It was so close that I felt like I could just reach out and grab it. I couldn’t believe my eyes. For me, it was an almost spiritual experience.
As the local folks say – No rain = No Rainbows. đ
Hi Sheila, Double rainbows are definitely magic. jerry
Lovely photo. We happened to see one, err … two, last February, but the secondary rainbow didn’t show up well on the camera.
We definitely had quite a bit of the type of rain that Dave is describing, just a faint mist. Although we’ve been to Maui many times before, this was our first time during the winter months. There was surely an increase amount in those types of showers, and luckily a corresponding increase in the number of rainbows.