Modern weather forecasting methods are based on measuring atmospheric pressure, air humidity, cloudiness, temperature, and precipitation. And what did people do before the appearance of precision instruments, if they needed to understand whether it would rain tomorrow? They watched the evening and morning sun, predicting what the next day would be. Ancient "meteorologists" memorized the relationship between the color of the sky and the weather, not understanding what exactly caused rain, wind, or bright sun. Later, scientists analyzed this connection and came to the conclusion that the color of sunsets and sunrises does not predict the weather more accurately than a flipped coin.
One of the signs sounds like this: "If at sunset, when the sun is still high, the sky turns red - to rain or wind, it turns red after sunset - to bad weather in one or two days." There are also signs for dawn: "If at dawn the sky or the rising sun is red, it means a change in the weather, rain or wind is possible."
Sunsets and sunrises are always painted in golden and orange tones. This is caused by a change in the path that the sunlight needs to travel to the observer. The more a person moves away from the Sun due to the rotation of the Earth, the more the angle of incidence of the rays decreases, and therefore the path of light through the atmosphere increases.
Illustration of increasing the path of the sun's rays / Illustration by RIA Novosti. Alina Polyanina
The wavelength is characterized by the distance between its nearest maximum or minimum. The shorter the wave, the more difficult it is for it to go around obstacles. That is why short-wave radiation is so dangerous - particles collide with literally everything that occurs in their path, transferring energy and ionizing various compounds.
The waves of such radiation are in a fairly wide range, but our eye is able to perceive the range from 400 to 760 nanometers. The bottom of this border is purple, and the top is red. From about 550 nanometers to 600 nanometers, yellow light is located, which at the upper border turns into orange. The interval from 500 to 550 nanometers is occupied by shades of green, and below is blue, gradually turning into purple.
The visible spectrum of sunlight / Illustration by RIA Novosti. Alina Polyanina
It would seem that the composition of the atmosphere (clouds, water vapor, smoke and dust particles) should affect the scattering of light, changing the color picture of sunsets and sunrises. After all, the more light is scattered, the longer the waves become. But the fact is that the color of the sky is determined by the scattering of light either on the molecules of gases that make up the air, or on clouds in the middle and upper troposphere (from five kilometers and above). At mid-latitudes, these clouds have nothing to do with meteorological phenomena at the surface. The same clouds that are associated with the weather are located mainly at heights of one to four kilometers, and smoke and dust in general are contained in significant quantities only in the lower one and a half to two kilometers of the atmosphere, therefore they cannot affect the scattering of light.
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“At such altitudes, a change in the composition of the atmosphere is possible only due to the formation of clouds and convective transport of moisture, which in mid-latitudes is quite intense only in summer. Therefore, the main contribution is made by the formation of clouds of the middle (4-6 kilometers) and upper layers (7-10 kilometers). Contamination from the surface (especially aerosols, the particles of which are quite heavy) do not reach this height. The only exception is volcanic eruptions (like Eyjafjallajökull that woke up in 2010), but these eruptions and the weather are unrelated things,”explains Alexei Eliseev, a leading researcher at the Obukhov Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Thus, the clouds associated with the weather have no effect on the color of the sunset and sunrise. And the content of aerosols in the atmosphere often changes after a change in the weather, and not before it, and even then not always. Therefore, it is better to trust the forecast of the meteorological service than to believe in folk omens, and then run in search of an umbrella or sunglasses.
Olga Kolentsova