Weather-wise, what happens to produce a double-wide rainbow?

Question

(Other than just rain) I mean a rainbow that goes through the ROYGBIV colors and then other colors after that. I saw one after a storm yesterday; I didn't know that was even possible.

Answer 1

For a rainbow, you only need rain and sun at the same time. It's pretty normal to see a second rainbow when it's raining a little bit longer, only the second rainbow is mostly very hard to see.

Did you know that the world record is 7 rainbows to be visible?

Answer 2

A normal rainbow forms by light that goes through a raindrop and gets dispersed into different colors and exits after reflecting once off the inside of the raindrop.  Some light actually leaves the raindrop after reflecting twice off the inside of the raindrop, and thats what makes the double rainbow--it also reverses the colors of the second rainbow.  You don't normally see the second rainbow because it's not bright enough.  What you need then to see it is sunlight shining brightly through lots of raindrops so that the double reflection colors become visible.  There are even more rainbows that can be seen, but they are usually so faint that they aren't seen.