Atmospheric Optical Phenomena - Reflection And Refraction, Displacement Phenomena, Green Flash, Scattered Light, Twinkling, Mirages, Rainbows
events atmosphere
Atmospheric optical phenomena are visual events that take place in Earth's atmosphere as a consequence of the way light is reflected, refracted, and diffracted by solid particles, liquids droplets, and other materials present in the atmosphere. Such phenomena include a wide variety of events ranging from the blue color of the sky itself to mirages and rainbows to sundogs and solar pillars.
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If Earth's atmosphere were a vacuum, the only atmospheric optical phenomenon observable would be a stream of white light from the sun. The fact that colors appear in the atmosphere is a consequence of the way that white light is broken up into its component parts—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet: the spectrum—during its interaction with materials in the atm…
The most remarkable phenomenon in the atmosphere is likely to be the rainbow. To understand how a rainbow is created, imagine a single beam of white light entering a spherical droplet of water. As the light passes from air into water, it undergoes refraction (that is, it is bent). However, each color present in the white light is bent by a different amount—the blues and violets more than th…
The passage of sunlight through cirrus clouds can produce any one of the optical phenomena known as haloes, sundogs, or sun pillars. One explanation for phenomena of this kind is that cirrus clouds consist of tiny ice crystals that refract light through very specific angles, namely 22° and 46°. When sunlight shines through a cirrus cloud, each tiny ice crystal acts like a glass prism…
In addition to reflection and refraction, the path of a light ray can be altered by yet a third mechanism, diffraction. Diffraction occurs when a light ray passes close to some object. For comparison, you can think of the way in which water waves are bent as they travel around a rock. Diffraction may also result in the separation of white light into its colored components. When light rays from the…
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