Okay Bowzer first of all...did you read up on Rayleigh scattering? I only ask because everywhere I looked it was talking about the very thing I described above...blue sky being reflected by water, it's all about why the sky is blue. All of them talk about the sky...no mention of the ocean except when they describe it just as I did.
Secondly...rain is essentially just small drops of water right? Ever put a small drop of water on a piece of transparent plastic then held it over a bit of small text? Yes it makes a small magnifying lens. Y'know those TIR lenses that so many people are just all happy about...basically just solid forms that act in the same way...refracting light and reflecting it off of the inside surface to focus it. As to the psychophysics...well I cannot comment on anything other than the odd name for such a facinating field of study.
It is still my opinion though, as I have not found any experiment or demonstration that suggests otherwise that the wavelength of the light makes almost no difference until the water droplets get down to near molecular size. I do intend to do some experimentation of my own though.
Thanks DH... my specialty is visual neurophysiology and psychophysics.
LF: I do know about Rayleigh scattering, and I know a lot about optics as well, because I teach sensory perception at my college. (I have a friend who has been a professional portrait and landscape photographer for 20 years, and I know more about optics than he does.)
Okay, enough hubris. Honestly, I really don't like spouting off like this on this or any forum about my education or career.
The generalized optical effects of water working as a lens only really apply when you have a significantly larger amount of water; a drop of water on a page of text is a lot bigger than a raindrop. Also, raindrops aren't round... in fact they're rather amorphous and subject to all the buffeting that goes on in the wind that accompanies a storm, so the chance that all the raindrops falling being properly shaped enough to act like lenses, let alone mirrors, is astronomically slim. If that was the case, when you shine a light out into a rainstorm, you'd get a disco-ball effect. With respect to Rayleigh scattering, I admit that effect is really most applicable in situations where you have something like fog, or mist, or a situation where there is a high density of scattered particulate matter in the air, like smoke. (Though smoke causes different refractive effects than fog because of it's different constituency.)
And what Bryan said about the color absorption of water is correct. Blue is the last color absorbed. This creates an effect called subtractive color mixing. Pigments create color by absorbing some frequencies of light while reflecting others. The reason we see leaves as green is because the chlorophyll in them absorbs all wavelengths other than green, and those green wavelengths are reflected back to us, which is why we see leaves as green. While this is the opposite of additive color mixing, which is where you combine more and more different wavelengths to create white light, even though water does refract light, it is also an absorptive material. That is why there's always some light loss in a flashlight even with ultra-clear lenses, and lenses with anti-reflective coating. Water has the same sort of absorptive effect as glass.
So, when you shine a light through fog or rain, the colors that are going to be absorbed are the warmer colors, and those that will be reflected are the cooler colors. So when you use a warm tinted light, you get less reflection because of the lower amount of blue light in it. What Bryan said about car headlights is also correct. The reason fog lights are yellow is because they cause less reflection off of the suspended water droplets in the air. And the reason they are always placed lower than headlights is because it increases the angle of the light to your line of sight. This maximizes the tangent function between the angle of the light and the angle of your line of sight, which creates more shadows, and also reduces the reflection to your line of sight. The reflection back will be greater in the direction of the light, and as you increase the tangent from the direction of the light, you get progressively less reflected light. As that happens, you get more scattered light, which is when the Rayleigh scattering comes into play, but the increased tangent also decreases the visual effect of the Rayleigh scattering as well.
That's why warm lights are better in fog and rain than cool lights.
