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Water vapor is a greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere, responsible for 70% of the known absorption of incoming sunlight, particularly in the infrared region, and about 60% of the atmospheric absorption of thermal radiation by the Earth known as the greenhouse effect. [25]
The refractive index of water at 20 °C for visible light is 1.33. [1] The refractive index of normal ice is 1.31 (from List of refractive indices). In general, an index of refraction is a complex number with real and imaginary parts, where the latter indicates the strength of absorption loss at a particular wavelength. In the visible part of ...
Also, out of about 340 W/m 2 of reflected shortwave (105 W/m 2) plus outgoing longwave radiation (235 W/m 2), 80-100 W/m 2 exits to space through the infrared window depending on cloudiness. About 40 W/m 2 of this transmitted amount is emitted by the surface, while most of the remainder comes from lower regions of the atmosphere. In a ...
Light is absorbed and reflected in water. Visible white light is made up of a spectrum of colors from the rainbow, ranging from red to violet. As the light travels through the water, the waves of light from the red end of the spectrum dissipate (i.e. are absorbed), while those from the blue end, become more prominent. [8]
The dominant radiative scattering processes in the atmosphere are Rayleigh scattering and Mie scattering; they are elastic, meaning that a photon of light can be deviated from its path without being absorbed and without changing wavelength. Under an overcast sky, there is no direct sunlight, and all light results from diffused skylight radiation.
Upon striking the sample, photons that match the energy gap of the molecules present (green light in this example) are absorbed, exciting the molecules. Other photons are scattered (not shown here) or transmitted unaffected; if the radiation is in the visible region (400–700 nm), the transmitted light appears as the complementary color (here ...
Just as with lenses and other optical components, ray tracing determines the light emanating from a single scatterer, and combining that result statistically for a large number of randomly oriented and positioned scatterers, one can describe atmospheric optical phenomena such as rainbows due to water droplets and halos due to ice crystals.
By this process of accumulation, the space between droplets becomes increasingly larger, permitting light to penetrate farther into the cloud. If the cloud is sufficiently large and the droplets within are spaced far enough apart, it may be that a percentage of the light which enters the cloud is not reflected back out before it is absorbed.