Читать книгу Weather For Dummies - John D. Cox - Страница 50

Sailors and poets and ancient thinkers all favored the idea that the moon has a lot to do with how things go here on Earth. A “ring around the moon” was seen as a sign of impending storminess, for example, but none of it is the moon’s doing.

That ring or halo is moonlight — sunshine reflecting off of the moon’s surface — scattering as it encounters thin clouds in the atmosphere. They might be high in the atmosphere, those clouds, but they are nowhere near the moon.

But the moon has this important indirect impact on weather: The tug of its gravity makes the tides of oceans and very large lakes rise and fall, and during powerful coastal storms, high tides can make the difference between inconvenience and natural disaster.