A Week of Amazing Sunsets Graces the East End

This last week has produced an amazing array of sunsets, each one different, each one powerful, but all of them glorious. I love sunsets. Being retired I try to be out sailing on Gardiner's Bay for them from May to November. I have posted hundreds if not thousands of sunset photos on Facebook over the last ten years, however this last week was perhaps the best ever.

I have noticed how many people everywhere all over the east end on both forks have commented on the sunsets. Folks lunching at Orient by the Sea, in Orient Point, dining at World Pie in Bridgehampton, ordering coffee at Starbucks in East Hampton, even my old Montauk (don't live there anymore) friends are talking about the amazing sunsets.

Years back when Larry Penny, the former East Hampton Town Environmentalist, was on my speed dial, I would call him and ask him about such things, and quite frankly Larry Penny always had a great answer. However I lost touch with Larry. However we now have Google on all our devices. So according to Science News, "The colors of the sunset result from a phenomenon called scattering. Molecules and small particles in the atmosphere change the direction of light rays, causing them to scatter. Scattering affects the color of light coming from the sky, but the details are determined by the wavelength of the light and the size of the particle."

That just didn't satisfy my curiosity, so I dug deeper into Google. I found an article in Weather Magazine by Stephen F. Corfidi that was pages long. In it he said, "To produce vivid sunset colors, a cloud must be high enough to intercept "unadulterated" sunlight...i.e., light that has not suffered attenuation and/or color loss by passing through the atmospheric boundary layer. (The boundary layer is the layer near the surface which contains most of the atmosphere's dust and haze). This largely explains why spectacular shades of scarlet, orange, and red most often grace cirrus and altocumulus layers, but only rarely low clouds such as stratus or stratocumulus. When low clouds do take on vivid hues, as they often do over the open ocean in the tropics, it is a clue that the lower atmosphere is very clean and therefore more transparent than usual."

My conclusion is that all the high winds and hurricane weather systems has cleaned up our skies and has presented us with the opportunity of seeing the sunsets we witnessed this week.