How long are clouds

Nimbostratus clouds are thick and dark and can produce both rain and snow. Low clouds fall into four divisions: cumulus, stratus, cumulonimbus, and stratocumulus. Cumulus clouds are a cloud-spotting favorite: They are big, white, and cottony and—depending on your imagination—may look like a bear, an apple, or any other familiar object.

Cumulonimbus clouds are heavy and dense; they tend to build dramatically upward and are often harbingers of thunderstorms, hail, or tornadoes. Stratus clouds appear as a thin gray layer in the sky. Stratocumulus clouds are patchy, gray and white, and usually resemble a honeycomb. Ever see one that looks like undulating waves? How about those pouch-like protrusions bulging from underneath larger clouds? Those are called mammatus clouds. Contrails are long bands of clouds produced by aircraft.

Otherworldly looking lenticular clouds resemble stacks of giant disks rising in the sky. No matter what shape or size they are, clouds are essential to life on Earth. At night they act as a blanket to keep us from getting too cold. They also provide precipitation and signal weather changes and patterns. Astrophysicists who study atmospheres on other planets know that Mars, for example, has clouds similar to ours.

Continuing to learn about weather on other worlds, they believe, will help us better understand—and predict—our own. All rights reserved. Colorful clouds and calm water create a striking sunset scene for canoeists on Winisk River in Ontario, Canada. Noctilucent clouds are the highest clouds in the sky, however they are not associated with weather like the rest of the clouds in this table.

Cloud heights are different at the tropics and in the polar regions. In addition, a few other cloud types are found in higher layers of the atmosphere. Polar stratospheric clouds are located in a layer of the atmosphere called the stratosphere.

A cumulus has approximately a quarter of a gram of water for every cubic metre of cloud. A quarter of a gram of water, all together, would make a drop of about the size of a marble.

But really in our cubic metre there would be around 1 million drops, so they are very tiny, too small to see. The next thing to consider is the size of the cloud. You can see how big cumulus clouds really are if you look at their shadow on the ground from a high view point on a sunny summer day.

Summer cumulus clouds vary in size, but a typical one would be about one kilometre across and about the same tall. This means we can consider it to be a cube, with each side measuring 1km across. That means our cloud is 1, x 1, x 1, cubic metres in size — and this makes 1 billion cubic metres.

The weight of the water in the cumulus cloud is ,, grams — tonnes. Technical Announcements. Employees in the News. Emergency Management. Survey Manual. I don't know anyone who is afraid to walk underneath a cumulus cloud because they are afraid it might fall on them. We don't think of clouds even having weight because they are floating.

But, clouds are made up of a physical substance, water, and water is quite heavy, so clouds must have weight. We will explain this "paradox" to you if you read on. We will use math instead of a giant weight scale to calculate the weight of a cumulus cloud.

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.