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13 - Visibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2014

Ian Strangeways
Ian Strangeways
Affiliation:
TerraData
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Summary

When the sun rose there was a white fog, very warm and clammy, and more blinding than the night, it did not shift or drive; it was just there, standing all round you like something solid.

Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (from a boat far up the Congo river).

Fog and mist figure deeply in the human psyche, casting an air of mystery and danger. Ships and boats still rely on reports of visibility, as now do aircraft, despite the arrival of radar; and lighthouses remain with us, albeit automated. But as a subject of scientific scrutiny, visibility is relatively new. It is surprisingly complex.

The variable and its history

Bouguer (1760), in his classic work on photometry, has a chapter on the transparency of the atmosphere. Thirty years later de Saussure (1789) (also inventor of the hair hygrometer) described a ‘diaphanometer’ for ‘measuring the clearness of air’, which although not very successful showed that he was aware of ‘air-light’ (below). Wild (1868) was the first to use photometric methods to measure the luminance of distant objects, but his theory was wrong, being based on the idea of absorption rather than scattering. Shortly after, however, the British mathematician Lord Rayleigh (1871a, 1871b, 1871c, 1899) wrote his classic papers on the scattering of light by air molecules and by small spherical particles, including the first correct explanation of why the sky is blue.

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Measuring the Natural Environment , pp. 320 - 342
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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References

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  • Visibility
  • Ian Strangeways, TerraData
  • Book: Measuring the Natural Environment
  • Online publication: 05 July 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139087254.013
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  • Visibility
  • Ian Strangeways, TerraData
  • Book: Measuring the Natural Environment
  • Online publication: 05 July 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139087254.013
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Visibility
  • Ian Strangeways, TerraData
  • Book: Measuring the Natural Environment
  • Online publication: 05 July 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139087254.013
Available formats
×