Clouds will easily weigh millions of pounds because they contain vast amounts of tiny droplets of water and ice. Cumulus clouds are the clouds that most people are familiar with. The average weight of these puffy white clouds is 1.1 million pounds (500,000 kg).
19 FEBRUARY 2015 They may look all light and fluffy, but the reality is that clouds are actually pretty heavy. Researchers have calculated that the average cumulus cloud – which is that nice, white fluffy kind you see on a sunny day – weighs an incredible 500,000 kg (or 1.1 million pounds!).
Next, you can use the density of a cloud to find its mass: Density = Mass / Volume0.5 grams per cubic meter = x / 1,000,000,000 cubic meters500,000,000 grams = mass.
What does the average cloud weigh?
Assuming the weight of air as 1.225 kg/m³LWC values for different clouds based on the above tableAssuming the volume occupied by water droplets is negligible.
Moreover, how much does a cloud in the sky weigh?
One cloud weighs as much as 100 elephants! Clouds appear to float so effortlessly in the sky that one would think that they are weightless. However, this is actually far from the case. A single cumulus cloud weighs 1.1 million pounds on average. To put this into perspective, that is equal to the weight of about 100 elephants or 2,500 donkeys!
When we were reading we ran into the inquiry “How many pounds does a cloud weigh?”.
The average cumulus, or fair-weather, cloud (which is photographed here) has been determined by researchers to weigh 1.1 million pounds. Though, not every cloud is created equal. A cloud with less water droplets, such as a high, wispy cirrus cloud, weighs less than a cumulus cloud.
The total mass of the cloud particles is about 1 million kilograms, which is roughly equivalent to the weight of 500 automobiles. But the total mass of the air in that same cubic kilometer is about 1 billion kilograms–1,000 times heavier than the liquid!
They may look all light and fluffy, but the reality is that clouds are actually pretty heavy. Researchers have calculated that the average cumulus cloud – which is that nice, white fluffy kind you see on a sunny day – weighs an incredible 500,000 kg (or 1.1 million pounds!).
What is a cloud?
A cloud is defined as ‘ a visible aggregate of minute droplets of water or particles of ice or a mixture of both floating in the free air’. Each droplet has a diameter of about a hundredth of a millimeter and each cubic meter of air will contain 100 million droplets.
This of course begs the query “What are clouds made of?”
Dust and other particles floating in the air provide surfaces for water vapor to turn into water drops or ice crystals. The tiny drops of water condense on the particles to form cloud droplets. Clouds are made up of a bunch of cloud droplets bundled together with raindrops.
That cools the water they leave behind. Heat causes some of the liquid water – from places like oceans, rivers and swimming pools – to change into an invisible gas called water vapor. This process is called evaporation and it’s the start of how clouds are formed .
How do ice crystals and water droplets co-exist in clouds?
Therefore, there are areas within a cloud were ice crystals and water droplets co-exist. When ice crystals and supercooled droplets are near each other, there is a movement of water molecules from the droplet to the crystal. This increases the size of the ice crystal at the expense of the droplet.