Light refraction in the earth’s atmosphere II. Inferior mirages: regions for images and objects observation

Abstract

In the present work, we analyze the different regions that are configured in a vertical plane for the visualization of the inferior mirage phenomenon. To achieve our goal, we take advantage of a methodology that we have previously developed to analytically obtain the path taken by any ray emerging from a point object, explicitly considering the atmosphere’s behavior near the surface. By means of this procedure we have reached analytical expressions, dependent on measurable temperature values, to delimit the observation regions in which it would be possible to see only objects, only images, both simultaneously, or none of them. From the expressions obtained, we study how these regions are distributed under different atmospheric conditions. The results obtained show that our methodology allow to predict the position (distance from the object and height from the ground) at which an observer should be located to observe the phenomenon, knowing the values of the air temperature at three different heights in the microlayer.