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Do you know how much a cloud weighs?

2023-01-13 21:09:37Lifestyle SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Do you know how much a cloud weighs?
Do you know how much a cloud weighs?

When you are flying over a "blanket" of clouds, the white and gray plumes appear soft and lighter than air. But don't be fooled by this image. Those clouds are much, much heavier than they look. How much does a cloud weigh? And how can one be weighed?

For this we asked the experts. Clouds are mainly composed of air and millions of tiny water droplets, which form when water condenses around a "seed" particle. The latter can be anything from nitric acid to vapors given off by trees, but they are generally very small.

There are several ways to measure the weight of a cloud. The first is to weigh the water vapor that makes it up, and to do that you need to know something about the dimensions of the cloud, says Armin Soroshian, a hydrologist at the University of Arizona in the US. You also need to know how dense these droplets are.

A few years ago, Margaret Lemon, an atmospheric scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, calculated the weight of water in an average cloud. First she measured the size of a cloud's shadow and estimated its height, assuming a roughly cubic shape.

Clouds are usually not cube-shaped, but rain clouds are often as tall as they are wide. Thus this assumption helped to simplify the volume calculation. Then, based on previous research, she estimated the density of water droplets to be about 1/2 gram per cubic meter.

"I came to the conclusion that it weighs about 550 tons of water or the weight of 100 elephants," she said. If one wanted to take Lemon's calculations a step further, one could take into account the weight of the air between each of the droplets. But if the clouds are so really so heavy, why don't they fall to Earth?

First, "the drops are so small that they don't fall very quickly," says Lemon. The average water droplet in a cloud is about 1 million times smaller than a normal raindrop. So approximately the ratio of the size of the Earth to the Sun.

High-altitude wind currents blow these tiny droplets, keeping them in the air for much longer than if they were static. Even the heat convention helps keep the water droplets aloft. "A cloud is actually less dense than the air directly beneath it," says Soroshian.

As warm air (and warm water) rises, it becomes more dynamic than the cold air (and cold water) below it, just like a layer of foam on a cappuccino. Of course, it can be said that the clouds "fall" in the form of rain. When water droplets in clouds cool and condense on each other, they expand, eventually becoming heavy enough to fall to Earth.

Although a raindrop is much larger than a water droplet in a cloud, according to the US University Center for Atmospheric Research each raindrop is only 2 millimeters in diameter. Those tiny droplets distribute the weight in such a way that 550 tons of water doesn't immediately fall on your head. So the next time you see a cloud passing over your head don't forget one fact: it weighs as much as 100 elephants!


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