Kindergarteners from Finn Academy are featured in this week’s Weather Wisdom. Avery Williams from group two asked, “why is the sky blue?”
It’s called Rayleigh scattering. The light that we see from the sun looks white, but it’s actually made up of every color of the rainbow. These colors travel at different wavelengths.
Light usually travels in a straight line, unless something gets in the way. In this case, we are talking about the gases in the atmosphere. As sunlight travels through the atmosphere, colors with longer wavelengths such as red, orange, yellow, and green pass through to our eyes. This combination still appears nearly white as they are mixed together. However, blue and even violet have smaller wavelengths. Blue and violet waves in return are separated from the rest of the sunlight and become scattered in all directions. We see that blue as our sky.
