Making Climate Physics Visible: The Concepts Behind Climate Lens VR

The Climate Lens VR simulation is designed to help students visualize and interact with physical processes that are normally invisible. In our atmosphere, energy moves in complex ways: bending, scattering, reflecting, and radiating across layers we can’t see with the naked eye. This simulation aims to change that.

Climate Lens is currently grounded in three key physics principles that shape Earth’s energy budget. In this post, we’ll walk you through each one, showing what it means, why it matters, and how you’ll experience it inside the VR environment.

Solar Irradiance & the Inverse Square Law:

Solar irradiance refers to the amount of solar energy received per square meter of a surface, a key input in Earth’s energy budget. It depends on how far a planet is from the Sun: the farther away it is, the more the energy spreads out, and the less irradiance it receives. This relationship follows the inverse square law, expressed by the equation:

where I is irradiance, S is the total solar output (the solar constant), and r is the distance from the Sun.

In Climate Lens VR, users begin their experience on a platform floating in outer space, positioned near Earth. From this vantage point, you’ll observe how solar rays, emitted from a directional light source representing the Sun, intersect with Earth. The density of these rays across Earth’s surface visually represents how solar irradiance behaves with distance: relatively concentrated for inner planets like Mercury and more diffuse for planets farther away.

While only Earth’s platform is currently active, future updates will include teleportable platforms near Mercury and Venus. These will allow you to compare how much solar irradiance each planet receives based on its distance from the Sun, offering a powerful visual representation of the inverse square law in action.

This cosmic overview sets the stage for everything that follows in the simulation, because the amount of energy Earth receives from the Sun determines how much is available to scatter, reflect, absorb, and re-emit through the rest of the system.

Rayleigh Scattering:

Rayleigh scattering is the process by which light interacts with particles that are much smaller than its wavelength, such as the nitrogen and oxygen molecules in Earth’s atmosphere. This interaction causes shorter wavelengths of light, such as blue, to scatter more strongly than longer wavelengths like red. As a result, Rayleigh scattering is responsible for the blue color of the daytime sky and the reddish hues we see at sunrise and sunset, when sunlight must travel through more of the atmosphere.

In Climate Lens VR, you’ll explore this phenomenon from a platform suspended within Earth’s atmosphere, giving you a front-row seat to observe how light behaves as it enters and moves through the air. You’ll be able to change the wavelength of incoming light and watch how differently colored rays scatter as they pass through the atmosphere.