Weather systems, disturbances in the atmosphere above us, can be dangerous. But the atmosphere can also offer views of some of the most spectacular sights in nature.
To appreciate those sights, we can start with the sky itself. The daytime sky appears blue—a brilliant darkish-blue on clear days and a milky whitish-blue on others. Although sunlight appears white, it’s actually a combination of colors along the spectrum from violets and blues to oranges and reds. Air molecules are smaller than the wavelengths of the various colors of the spectrum. When sunlight hits the atmosphere, air molecules can scatter the light separately by wavelength, or color. Because blue light wavelengths are shorter and smaller, blue light is scattered more, and so this is what we see. Blueness of the sky is maximized during the middle of the day. At sunrise and sunset, the sun’s rays travel through more of the atmosphere. More of the blue light is scattered before it reaches your location, so the reddish part of the spectrum becomes more dominant. Therefore, sunrises and sunsets are famously red in color.
Clouds often add to the visual effect of colorful and . They reflect
