How tall is the cloud?

Low level clouds are generally based at or below 6,500 feet above ground, mid-level clouds are generally based between 6,500 feet and 15,000 feet above ground, and high level clouds are generally based more than 15,000 feet above ground.

How high up are clouds in miles?

According to “The Cloud Spotter's Guide” (by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, Perigee Books, 2006), a puffy cumulus cloud (cumulus mediocris) averages about 2500 feet altitude (1/2 mile) over flat land.

How thick is cloud?

Three-layered clouds tend to involve a low-, middle- and high-level layer filling the atmosphere below about 10 km as might be expected given the facts that typical (average) cloud layer thicknesses are 0.5 (1.5) km and typical (average) layer separations are 1 (2) km.

How heavy is a cloud full of water?

A 1 cubic kilometer (km³⁾ cloud contains 1 billion cubic meters. Doing the math: 1,000,000,000 x 0.5 = 500,000,000 grams of water droplets in our cloud. That is about 500,000 kilograms or 1.1 million pounds (about 551 tons).

How heavy do clouds get?

Answer: Thus, a 'typical' fair weather cumulus cloud "weighs" about 1 billion 400 million pounds, or about 800 million pounds less than dry air of equal volume. Thats a lot of weight!

How is the height of a cloud base determined?

How fast do clouds move?

Depending on how fast the winds are blowing at the level of the clouds will determine how fast the clouds are traveling. High cirrus clouds are pushed along by the jet stream and can travel at more than 100 mph. Clouds that are part of a thunderstorm usually travel at 30 to 40 mph.

What is cloud made of?

Clouds form when the invisible water vapor in the air condenses into visible water droplets or ice crystals. For this to happen, the parcel of air must be saturated, i.e. unable to hold all the water it contains in vapor form, so it starts to condense into a liquid or solid form.

Why are clouds white?

In a cloud sunlight is scattered equally, meaning that the sunlight continues to remain white and gives clouds their distinctive white appearance.

Why do clouds turn grey when raining?

As the size and concentration of the hydrometeors increases, less and less sunlight penetrates the cloud, resulting in multiple scattering. We perceive these clouds as dark clouds in varying shades of grey.

Why do clouds turn black?

As clouds build vertically and get thicker, such as a cumulonimbus cloud, less light can pass through the cloud. This will give it a darker appearance. This is also the reason why the bottom of clouds sometimes appear darker than the top.

Why do clouds turn red?

As light continues to move though the atmosphere, yellow wavelengths are scattered leaving orange wavelengths. Further scattering of orange wavelengths leaves red as the predominate color of sunlight. Therefore, near sunrise and sunset, a cloud's color is what sunlight color it receives after Rayleigh scattering.

Is a cloud 100% water?

Clouds are not 100 percent water. They also contain salt, dust, and other particles and chemical substances. There are ten different types of clouds, and each one can provide valuable information about current and future weather conditions.

Is there more water in the sky or ocean?

The ocean holds about 97 percent of the Earth's water; the remaining three percent is distributed in many different places, including glaciers and ice, below the ground, in rivers and lakes, and in the atmosphere.

What keeps clouds in the sky?

Water droplets in air behave the same way as dust⁶. The second reason that clouds can float in the air is that there is a constant flow of warm air rising to meet the cloud: the warm air pushes up on the cloud and keeps it afloat.

How far can a cloud travel in a day?

The simple answer is, clouds can travel for hundreds of miles in one day, but it just depends on where they formed in the atmosphere. Low clouds can form as low as 5,000 feet, where other clouds, such as cirrus, form at 30,000+ feet.

Is there wind above clouds?

Wind occurs at all levels of the atmosphere from the ground up to higher than a jumbo jet can fly. Sometimes there can be no wind on the ground, but cirrus clouds very high up can be seen moving because of the wind where they are.

How long do clouds last for?

How long is a cloud's lifespan? There is no fixed time, but it could vary from minutes to hours. The beginning and end time of a given cloud can be vague, especially when one “cloud type” becomes another.

What keeps the water on Earth?

On the “near” side of the Earth (the side facing the moon), the gravitational force of the moon pulls the ocean's waters toward it, creating one bulge. On the far side of the Earth, inertia dominates, creating a second bulge. In this way the combination of gravity and inertia create two bulges of water.

Is there any water under the Earth?

The finding, published in Science, suggests that a reservoir of water is hidden in the Earth's mantle, more than 400 miles below the surface. Try to refrain from imagining expanses of underground seas: all this water, three times the volume of water on the surface, is trapped inside rocks.

Where is the Earth's water going?

Over millions of years, much of this water is recycled between the inner Earth, the oceans and rivers, and the atmosphere. This cycling process means that freshwater is constantly made available to Earth's surface where we all live. Volcanoes release massive amounts of water from the inner Earth to the atmosphere.

Why do clouds disappear?

The three primary ways that clouds dissipate is by (1) the temperature increasing, (2) the cloud mixing with drier air, or (3) the air sinking within the cloud. When the temperature increases, the air has a higher capacity to evaporate liquid water.

How hot can a cloud get?

the cloud temperature at cloud top ranging from 150 to 340 K. the cloud pressure at top 1013 - 100 hPa. the cloud height, measured above sea level, ranging from 0 to 20 km.

What is cloud to snow called?

Thick, dense stratus or stratocumulus clouds producing steady rain or snow often are referred to as nimbostratus clouds.

Why do clouds look weird at night?

Under these conditions, water vapor freezes onto any dust particles floating in the region, forming ice crystals that congregate into tendrils and filaments. These thin clouds come to life around dusk and dawn, when the angle of sunlight makes them seem to glow against the darker twilight skies.

What color do clouds turn before a tornado?

“Those are the kind of storms that may produce hail and tornadoes.” Green does indicate that the cloud is extremely tall, and since thunderclouds are the tallest clouds, green is a warning sign that large hail or a tornado may be present.