How much do clouds weigh video

So, as Matt Soniak writes over at Mental Floss , that's about a marble's worth of water in a box large enough for you and a friend to sit in. Not very much. Obviously, the density of other types of clouds would be much greater, but let's stick to the cumulus for now.

Once you've worked out the density of your cloud, you need to work out how big it is, which is a measurement that also varies widely. Peggy LeMone , who led a lot of the cloud weighing research at the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research, calculated that the average cumulus is about a kilometre across and roughly has the shape of a cube, so it's as tall as it is wide.

Do the maths on that, and you've got a cloud with a volume of one billion cubic metres. Times that by your density and you get your answer of almost , kg. Or, as LeMone explained it to Soniak , think of that as elephants. So now the real question is, how does all this massive weight stay afloat in the sky? What's stopping it from collapsing on our heads at any moment?

Do you think clouds have any weight? How can they, if they are floating in the air like a balloon filled with helium? If you tie a helium balloon to a kitchen scale it won't register any weight, so why should a cloud?

To answer this question, let me ask if you think air has any weight—that is really the important question. If you know what air pressure and a barometer are, then you know that air does have weight. Since air has weight it must also have density , which is the weight for a chosen volume, such as a cubic inch or cubic meter.

If clouds are made up of particles, then they must have weight and density. The key to why clouds float is that the density of the same volume of cloud material is less than the density of the same amount of dry air.

Just as oil floats on water because it is less dense, clouds float on air because the moist air in clouds is less dense than dry air. We still need to answer the question of how much a cloud weighs. To confuse things more, the weight depends on how you define it:.

We're only going to look at the weight of the actual cloud particles. A 1 cubic kilometer km 3 cloud contains 1 billion cubic meters. Doing the math: 1,,, x 0. That is about , kilograms or 1.

But, that "heavy" cloud is floating over your head because the air below it is even heavier— the lesser density of the cloud allows it to float on the dryer and more-dense air. Why does this cloud exist? As a child, you heard about "The little engine that could", but what about "The little cloud that could"?

You can see in this picture a small, solitary little cloud in an otherwise totally clear sky. What is it about that tiny spot in the sky that allows that cloud to form? The atmosphere is the superhighway in the sky that moves water everywhere over the Earth.

Water at the Earth's surface evaporates into water vapor which rises up into the sky to become part of a cloud which will float off with the winds, eventually releasing water back to Earth as precipitation. The air is full of water, as water vapor, even if you can't see it. Condensation is the process of water vapor turning back into liquid water, with the best example being those big, fluffy clouds floating over your head.

And when the water droplets in clouds combine, they become heavy enough to form raindrops to rain down onto your head. This picture shows cumulonimbus clouds over Africa photographed from the International Space Station. Cumulonimbus from the Latin for "puffy" and "dark" clouds form due to vigorous movement of warm and moist unstable air. Rising air currents containing water vapor and varying layers of differing-.

On California's Marin Headlands, facing away from the Golden Gate Bridge, the August heat hits the cool air from the Ocean, creating a very thick fog that tends to sit low on the ground. The temperature difference also creates wind, pushing the fog like a ribbon in a fan.

What's happening above those mountains? Several clouds are stacked up into one striking lenticular cloud. Normally, air moves much more horizontally than it does vertically. Sometimes, however, such as when. You've seen the cloud-like trails that high-flying airplanes leave behind and you probably know they are called contrails.

Maybe you didn't know they were called that because they are actually condensation trails and, in fact, are not much different than. Skip to main content. Search Search. Water Science School.