EPS 7 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Rayleigh Scattering, Mie Scattering, Infrared Thermometer
21 Jul 2018
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Earth has an atmosphere, but mercury and mars don"t. The atmosphere interacts with radiation in two ways: it scatters some shortwave (we accounted for this by using an albedo of 0. 3, the sun is orange and the sky is blue. Rayleigh scattering by molecules redirects photons into a new direction. Short wavelengths (blue) are much more strongly scattered than long wavelength (red or infrared) Blue is scattered and red isn"t (sky is blue: clouds are visible from space. Clouds scatter sunlight, but by mie scattering (cloud drops are bigger than n2 molecules), so no wavelength preference, therefore, clouds are white: it absorbs and emits long wave. We cannot see the infrared because water, like most solids and liquids, is opaque in the infrared, and our eyes are basically balls of water. An infrared thermometer measures the power per area in infrared radiation emitted by an object you point it at.
