Why is it that in the morning, the sunlight is not that hot and healthy for our health. Then suddenly in the afternoon, it became extremely hot.
It is the same sunlight anyway? Just different position from Earth’s pov?
Why is it that in the morning, the sunlight is not that hot and healthy for our health. Then suddenly in the afternoon, it became extremely hot.
It is the same sunlight anyway? Just different position from Earth’s pov?
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It’s not the sun that’s changing, it’s the air. In the afternoon, the ground and air have been warmed by the sun all day and have retained that heat. In the morning, it was just night when it was cooler.
2 reasons
1.) In the morning the sun is not hitting the spot your are on earth directly. It’s kinda glancing the edge so it has to travel through more of the atmosphere, bouncing off more air molecules, and getting diffused a lot more. Hence why at Sunrise and sunset you can glance towards the sun without getting instantly blinded.
2.) It’s cooler in the morning, so you have colder air around you. So when the sun light hits you it warms you up a little and it feels nice. Whereas in the afternoon it’s typically warmer, so that extra heat can’t radiate off your body as well so you’re uncomfortable.
(I’m not an expert) But the heat you feel doesn’t really come from the air that the sun would make hot but about the amount of UV you get, you can feel it when a small cloud block the sun, it gets colder almost instantly. So in the morning the sun is low, while in the afternoon it’s right above you.
In the morning, the ground and everything around you is still colder from the night time. In the afternoon, if the sun has been shining all day, it has heated up the ground, roads, buildings, the air around you etc., so now those are also giving off heat in addition to the sun, so you feel warmer.
Two things: angle and air temp.
When the sun is lower in the sky, it’s hitting your position on earth at a shallower angle, which means sun rays are spread over a longer surface. As the sun rises you get more and more rays on the same area, with peak being midday. From there, it begins to reduce again until sundown. The thing is, those “rays” translate directly into energy transferred to earth by the sun’s radiation, which ultimately generates heat. (Its the same principle that explains why higher latitudes are generally colder. They simply get less from the sun, since its peak is lower and lower in the sky. Same for the winter. The opposite is true for the equator, and the summer.)
Then, there’s the atmospheric temperature. So, from sunrise, the radiation starts heating all surfaces, which in turn heat the air around us. In other words: the atmosphere traps the heat. As more and more energy is added along the day, the tendency is for heat to accumulate in our atmosphere, causing temperatures to rise. In the afternoon, even as the sun begins to lose strength, the air tends to get hotter and hotter, until the energy lost through dissipation overpowers the energy brought in by the sun. Obviously the weather interferes in this pattern, but that’s the overall tendency for any place on Earth. It varies from place to place, but on average the hotter hour of the day is around 3 pm. That’s why you feel hotter in the afternoon than during the morning hours.