Understand why the UK sun woke up ‘blue’ and shocked the internet | climate

“Wow, I’ve never seen this before”: that was the tone of conversations on social media about the blue sun that caught the attention of the British people on Thursday morning (28). It could have been another normal day, but the unusual color shocked residents and many were confused. Fortunately, meteorologists have made it clear that there is no cause for concern and that the explanation for the color change is simple: Smoke from Canadian forest fires.

Dan Harris, deputy chief meteorologist at the Met Office, said daily Mail: “We have a strong westerly influence on our weather right now, and this could bring air from North America into Europe to participate in our weather systems. A combination of smoke and clouds high in the atmosphere can scatter sunlight, creating unusual colors.”

Knowing the real reason, Twitter users continued the discussion. “I remember the dark orange-red color of the sun in 2017 when the sun swept smoke from the Portuguese bushfires across the UK… why blue this time?”Posted by Dan Harris of MetOffice.

In response, Chris PageThe ITV weather presenter explained. “I’m getting a lot of questions about the sun being mysteriously blue today,” he said. According to him, the force of the smoke spread sunlight that was pulled across the Atlantic Ocean from North America due to Storm Agnes – which brought winds of up to 128.75 km/h and has left most parts of the UK on yellow alert since yesterday. until 7 a.m. this Thursday. Today the extreme weather event has moved to Scotland.

In physics, each visible color has a different wavelength. “Violet has the shortest wavelength, about 380 nanometers, and red has the longest wavelength, about 700 nanometers,” NASA explains. As it heads toward Earth, sunlight naturally scatters through particles in the air, such as dust and smoke. This means that the shorter the wavelengths, the easier the light is to scatter, which also explains why the sky is blue.