A photo of four rainbows in New York is striking a pot of gold on social media, but an expert in such rare events said this isn’t quite the quadruple miracle that it seems.
“I had a moment of awe, heard my train coming, snapped the photo and ran after my train,” said Amanda Curtis, co-founder of a Brooklyn-based fashion startup called Nineteenth Amendment, who took the photo in Glen Cove on Long Island. “It was very inspiring.”
Many are calling it a quadruple rainbow. But it’s not, said Raymond Lee, a professor of meteorology at the U.S. Naval Academy, who studies and writes about rare rainbows.
First, a quick primer on rainbows. They are created when light is reflected through water droplets. A double rainbow happens when leftover light comes back for a second reflection through the raindrop. With each turn, the rainbow fades a bit.
When light heads through for a third or fourth time – called tertiary and quaternary, not quadruple – that is rare, maybe five have been confirmed in 250 years, Lee said.