When we turn our face towards the sun on a day with clear skies: Is the heat we feel on our skin actual heat radiation from the surface of the sun or do we just feel the warmth of the molecules in our atmosphere which have been “warmed” by radiation from the upper atmosphere?
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So many wrong answers here. You get hit bit UV radiation, aka really fast energetic light packets. Those absorb into the atoms of your translucent skin/tissues, do some damage to the molecules, and the rest of the energy gets emmited back as light and infrared light.
You can see the light reflected back in your skin color by your face being lit.
You feel warm because you emit infrared light which is heat.
Beyond that the heat loss creates a thin blanket of hot air next to your skin, and the sensation of warm or cold is in relation to that air, so when you blow on your hand you feel cold for example.
Alternatively you know the answer is UV and not hot air because the sun is so far away the entire day hemisphere is heated by it so everything is pretty much uniformly heated around you, except for shadows and the winds those create.
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