Easter Sunday rainbow gleams over Scripps Pier

SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) -- An early morning rainbow lit up the sky over Scripps Pier in Jolla on Easter Sunday as local surfers made their way past the shoreline.

UC San Diego photographer Erik Jepsen captured the illuminating moment on camera, with one shot even capturing what appears to be a double rainbow.

Scattered showers trickled throughout the region Sunday morning, remnants of an atmospheric river that dumped rain across the region just the day before. In fact, several daily rainfall records were broken in areas like San Diego, Chula Vista, Ramona, Alpine and Vista.

The wet weather created what the National Weather Service has said is “an ideal setup for rainbows." As explained by weather officials, traditional rainbows occurs when “sunlight is spread out into its spectrum of colors and diverted to the eye of the observer by water droplets.”

To explain further, the “bow” part of the word refers to the fact that the rainbow is a group of nearly circular arcs of color all having a common center, said the weather service. Typically, we only see a portion of the entire circle, leading to the bow shape.

This was true when it came to Jepsen's captures over the pier Sunday.

With scattered rain showering the county Easter Sunday, the weather service explained that “as light enters the raindrop, it is refracted (the path of the light is bent to a different angle) and some of the light is reflected by the internal, curved, mirror-like surface of the raindrop.”

This creates the colors of a rainbow for observers.