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It is based on the reddish glow of the morning or evening sky, caused by trapped particles scattering the blue light from the sun in a stable air mass. [5] If the morning skies are of an orange-red glow, it signifies a high-pressure air mass with stable air trapping particles, like dust, which scatters the sun's blue light.
Crepuscular rays usually appear orange because the path through the atmosphere at dawn and dusk passes through up to 40 times as much air as rays from a high Sun at noon. Particles in the air scatter short- wavelength light (blue and green) through Rayleigh scattering much more strongly than longer-wavelength yellow and red light.
This process of reflection/absorption is what causes the range of cloud color from white to black. [19] Other colors occur naturally in clouds. Bluish-grey is the result of light scattering within the cloud. In the visible spectrum, blue and green are at the short end of light's visible wavelengths, while red and yellow are at the long end. [20]
Here, the path of sunlight through the atmosphere is elongated such that much of the blue or green light is scattered away from the line of perceivable visible light. This phenomenon leaves the Sun's rays, and the clouds they illuminate, abundantly orange-to-red in colors, which one sees when looking at a sunset or sunrise.
A sunbeam, in meteorological optics, is a beam of sunlight that appears to radiate from the position of the Sun. Shining through openings in clouds or between other objects such as mountains and buildings, these beams of particle-scattered sunlight are essentially parallel shafts separated by darker shadowed volumes.
The Rayleigh sky causes a clearly defined polarization pattern under many different circumstances. The degree of polarization however, does not always remain consistent and may in fact decrease in different situations. The Rayleigh sky may undergo depolarization due to nearby objects such as clouds and large reflecting surfaces such as the ocean.
A red sky – in the morning or evening – is a result of high pressure air in the atmosphere trapping particles of dust or soot. Air molecules scatter the shorter blue wavelengths of sunlight, but particles of dust, soot and other aerosols scatter the longer red wavelength of sunlight in a process called Rayleigh scattering .
Rayleigh scattering of sunlight in Earth's atmosphere causes diffuse sky radiation, which is the reason for the blue color of the daytime and twilight sky, as well as the yellowish to reddish hue of the low Sun. Sunlight is also subject to Raman scattering, which changes the rotational state of the molecules and gives rise to polarization ...