People hear some remarkable phenomena, such as thunder, and see some remarkable phenomena, such as sun rays, glories, and rainbows, in the atmosphere. These phenomena are studied mainly by physicists and involve the disciplines of atmospheric acoustics and atmospheric or meteorological optics.

Atmospheric phenomena are interesting to perceptionists because perception sometimes disagrees with reality (making these phenomena seem to be illusions) and because they give an opportunity to test the generality of perceptual principles discovered in the laboratory. This entry describes atmospheric acoustics and optics.