I dont know why, but you can always “tell” when a dark cloud is approaching even if you arent looking at the sky. There is something about the sunlight, overal ambience or shadows that changes but i cant put my finger on it.
Ive always had this and just now i woke up from a nap, looked inside my room, beeing filled with lovely sunlight, but something was “off”. I knew it within an instance and when i looked outside i was correct, dark clouds in the distance.
Hoping for someone to finally explain this to me ^^
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Picture a garden hose with a spray nozzle set to a tight cone about 1 foot in diameter when 10 feet from you. Imagine spraying that cone at a fence post standing in the grass. The cone passes on both sides of the post – but some of it hits the post and gets bounced off in a different direction. Imagine you were in that cone so that part of it hit you. As you move, the cone follows you, so when you move so that the post is between you and the hose, you sense the water dropping off even if it’s not dropping off directly at you yet…
When the light hits the earth’s atmosphere, it comes in kind of like that cone of water. It also bounces around. Much of the light just keeps on traveling straight down to the planets surface but enough hits things in the way that it bounces around. What things in the way? Air molecules, dust, water molecules, etc. Lots of it even bounces back into space.
So you, on the ground, are inside that cone of “spray”. The cloud is like the post – the light is interrupted somewhat – and the cloud absorbs a lot of it. It absorbs enough so that less reaches you even indirectly. By the time light hits us on earth it’s bouncing around in all directions so much that when a big chunk from a specific spot goes missing, we can notice it. The cloud is the fence post in the spray of the garden hose.
Have you ever noticed that when a dark cloud rolls in, the sunlight seems to change? That’s because the cloud is blocking some of the sun’s rays from reaching the ground. The cloud acts like a filter, absorbing or scattering certain wavelengths of light. This can make the sunlight look dimmer or redder. The effect can be pretty intense, especially if the cloud is thick or close to the ground. So when you see a dark cloud coming and the sunlight looks different, it’s probably because the cloud is blocking some of the light.
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