Sunrise(Federico Respini / Unsplash)Look for certain conditions to create a beautiful sunrise.This segment originally aired in June 2022.This transcript was edited for clarity and length.Bill Burton: It's time for us to take a look at the Science Behind the Forecast as we're joined by WAVE 3 meteo rologist Tawana Andrew. Good morning, Tawana.Tawana Andrew: Good morning. Today we're kind of answering a question that one of my coworkers had. I thought it was pretty interesting about how we basically start our day.BB: In-house questions can always be great, and the question was about sunrise. That's our topic today. We're talking about sunrise. What do we need to know?TA: The question was about sunrises, and how I know, when I'm on TV, just looking at something, that a sunrise is going to be gorgeous before it even happens. Things that I think about are just how our atmosphere works. We have mostly oxygen and nitrogen as the main components in our atmosphere. When sunlight hits those molecules, it scatters that light all over our atmosphere, depending on the wavelength of light. Overall, since you have oxygen and nitrogen, which are pretty small overall compared to the wavelengths of light, they tend to scatter more of that blue and the purple. Because of the way our eyes work, we mainly just see the blue light.Our sky is blue because of what's called Rayleigh scattering. That is fully dependent on wavelength, so when the sun is directly overhead, that light scattering is at its maximum, and we see that bright blue color. At sunrise and sunset, when you see the sun getting a little bit further down in the horizon, the wavelength of visible light increases a little bit more, and that is why you see more of those oranges, you see more of the red in that situation. There's an idea that pollution and even extra moisture in the air can make sunrises and sunsets look brighter, but it's actually the opposite effect.It makes it more muddy and mutes the colors a little bit more of the sunrise, because these particles are basically absorbing more light and scattering all the wavelengths equally. You don't see those distinct colors like you like to see in a gorgeous sunrise. In fact, you see brighter sunsets in the eastern half of the country in fall and winter, because we don't have as much moisture in the air at that point. We don't have as much of the pollutant, so the air is cleaner, it's drier, and the sun just has clear paths straight across the sky. That's why those fall and winter sunrises and sunsets just seem to be more crisp, if you want to put it that way.Clouds, in my opinion, make things even better for a sunrise and sunset. If anybody remembers all the pictures that were on Instagram earlier this week of that one day when we had those clouds rolling in, the clouds tend to just grab that little first piece of light that comes over the horizon at sunrise and reflects it down towards the ground. You end up having the more colorful, more interesting sunrises and sunsets when you have mid to upper level clouds like alto cumulus and cirrus clouds. Because it's just reflecting the light in a slightly different way, it makes things, in my opinion, a little bit more interesting. If you ever hear me on TV in the morning saying we have upper level clouds coming in, and there's low humidity, grab your phone, grab your camera. You know it's going to be a really good sunrise on that day. ...read more read less