Report: Triple rainbows DO exist

Sadly, the "Double Rainbow" video does not capture a triple rainbow

We’ve all seen the video: Hungrybear9562, aka Yosemitebear, aka Bear, aka Paul Vasquez captures a double rainbow on camera and has what sounds like an incapacitating emotional breakdown over the vision.  Double rainbows are awe-inspiring, especially when accompanied by wind chimes and an early morning bong hit.  At one point in the video, Hungrybear thinks he may be seeing a triple rainbow, at which point the hysterics really get going.  There has been much controversy over whether or not the video captures a triple rainbow (note: there has been no controversy).  But now, a report published this week in the Optical Society’s journal Applied Optics confirms: triple rainbows do exist.

Triple rainbow (also called tertiary rainbow) sightings are so rare that only five have been reported in the last 250 years, leading many scientists to speculate that they don’t actually exist at all. 

In the report, Raymond Lee, a professor of meteorology at the U.S. Naval Academy, explains how a tertiary rainbow—and even a quaternary rainbow (a quadruple rainbow!)—is possible.  Lee and colleague Philip Laven worked up a mathematical formula to predict the exact conditions that would produce a triple rainbow, which photographers Michael Grossman and Michael Theusner used to find and snap the elusive rainbows.

But there’s some sad news for Hungrybear: Professor Lee and atmospheric scientist Michael Theusner have both confirmed that Bear’s video does NOT capture a triple rainbow.

“While the YouTube video shows us a magnificent, long-lived double rainbow, this is just the ordinary primary rainbow inside a secondary rainbow,” Professor Lee tells me.  “The much dimmer (and rarer) tertiary bow is seen around the sun, rather than on the opposite side of the sky, which is where the primary and secondary occur.”

The viral YouTube video became a huge hit in late 2010, some eight months after it was uploaded.  To date, the video has gotten over 30.7 million views and has inspired everything from the Double Rainbow song (now on iTunes) to Double Rainbow T-shirts.  Hungrybear/Yosemitebear/Bear/Paul described his experience witnessing the double rainbow in an interview:

“The rainbow was the Universe or Spirit flowing through me, the reaction you heard was how I reacted to seeing the Holy Ghost, kind of like Moses seeing the burning bush in the 10 commandments.”