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 1,000 x 1,000 x 1,000 cubic metres in size ” and this makes 1 billion cubic metres.
How many miles long is a cloud?
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. This variety of cumulus is about as thick as it is wide.
Noctilucent clouds are composed of tiny crystals of water ice up to 100 nm in diameter and exist at a height of about 76 to 85 km (249,000 to 279,000 ft), higher than any other clouds in Earth’s atmosphere.
Can you touch a cloud?
Unfortunately, it does not feel like cotton balls or cotton candy, but most people have technically touched a cloud before. If you wanted to touch an airborne cloud, the best way to do this is either skydiving or in a hot air balloon, though I would not want to be stuck in a cloud while in a hot air balloon.
Clouds are classified by their shape or appearance and their height above the ground. High clouds start above around 20,000 feet (6,000 meters). They often look thin and patchy or feathery.
How heavy is a cloud?
According to scientists, the weight of the average cumulus cloud is 1.1 million pounds! Think about that for a moment. This means that at any given moment, there are millions of pounds of water floating above your head.
How old is the oldest cloud?
Astronomers have discovered the largest and oldest mass of water ever detected in the universe ” a gigantic, 12-billion-year-old cloud harboring 140 trillion times more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.
What is the rarest cloud?
Scientists have called noctilucent clouds “the highest, driest, coldest, and rarest clouds on Earth.” Indeed, most of the planet’s clouds form in the troposphere, the layer of atmosphere closest to the ground, and occasionally in the stratosphere.
How heavy is the heaviest cloud?
That is about 500,000 kilograms or 1.1 million pounds (about 551 tons). 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.
Can you put a cloud in a jar?
Can you make a cloud in a jar? Absolutely! With just a few things from around the house you can simulate the conditions needed for clouds to form.
Can you eat clouds?
As clouds are made up of water vapor and helium, they are not harmful to eat. While eating clouds isn’t exactly harmful, it certainly isn’t nutritious.
Are clouds cold or hot?
Clouds consist of microscopic droplets of liquid water (warm clouds), tiny crystals of ice (cold clouds), or both (mixed phase clouds).
Why are clouds white?
Clouds are white because light from the Sun is white. As light passes through a cloud, it interacts with the water droplets, which are much bigger than the atmospheric particles that exist in the sky.
How far up is space?
The Kármán line, an altitude of 100 km (62 mi) above sea level, is conventionally used as the start of outer space in space treaties and for aerospace records keeping. The framework for international space law was established by the Outer Space Treaty, which entered into force on 10 October 1967.
How tall is the sky?
The highest clouds are no higher than 12 kilometres (7.5 miles) above ground, so that altitude could be considered the “height of the sky”. Or it could be the boundary between the atmosphere and space”the upper limit for aircraft”which scientists give as 100 kilometres (62 miles) above ground.
Why does rain fall from clouds?
Precipitation forms in the clouds when water vapor condenses into bigger and bigger droplets of water. When the drops are heavy enough, they fall to the Earth. If a cloud is colder, like it would be at higher altitudes, the water droplets may freeze to form ice.
Why do clouds not fall?
Like everything on this planet, the tiny droplets that make up a cloud are drawn towards the Earth by gravity. But these droplets are so small that it’s hard for them to push past all the air beneath them. This means that they don’t fall very fast at all ” in fact, only about one centimetre per second.
Are rain clouds heavy?
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!).
How heavy is a thundercloud?
Viewed from a plane, clouds appear fluffy and light, but in fact the water droplets and ice crystals making up the average cumulus cloud (1km cubed in size) weigh around 550 tonnes ” the same as a herd of 100 African elephants. Meanwhile, a towering thunderstorm cloud is equivalent to 200,000 elephants.
Is there a cloud of alcohol in space?
Yes, there is a giant cloud of alcohol in outer space. It’s in a region known as W3(OH), only about 6500 light years away. Unfortunately it is methyl alcohol (commonly known as wood alcohol, though this stuff is not derived from wood), so it isn’t suitable for drinking.
Where is the most water in the universe?
Located 30 billion miles away in a quasar ” a massively powerful cosmic body ” the water cloud is estimated to contain at least 140 trillion times the amount of water in all the seas and oceans here on Earth.
What is the weirdest cloud in the world?
With an array of lumps and bulges, the mammatus cloud is by far one of the most unusual and distinct cloud formations. Turbulance within a cumulonimbus cloud will cause mammatus clouds to form. Cumulonimbus clouds are often otherwise known as thunderstorm clouds, which are very large and usually very unstable.
What are the 3 unusual clouds?
Unusual Clouds: Lenticular, Virga, Mammatus, Kelvin-Helmholtz.
What is the most beautiful cloud?
Nacreous or mother-of-pearl clouds, spotted over Kells, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. The mother-of-pearl colours of the stratospheric nacreous clouds make them one of the most beautiful formations.
Why do clouds turn GREY?
When clouds are thin, they let a large portion of the light through and appear white. But like any objects that transmit light, the thicker they are, the less light makes it through. As their thickness increases, the bottoms of clouds look darker but still scatter all colors. We perceive this as gray.
Why do clouds turn pink?
Excess dust and aerosols suspended in the atmosphere diffuse and scatter light and only the longer wavelength light remains, making the clouds appear pink color or a pinkish-red sky at night.
How much rain can a cloud hold?
A large cumulus cloud that you might find on a nice summer day is made up of about 1 million pounds of water drops. A thunderstorm cloud contains enough water drops to fill up approximately 275 million gallon jars. That’s about 2.3 billion pounds, or 1.1 million tons of water.
Does it hurt to fall through a cloud?
Skydiving through rain can be painful because you’re falling at terminal velocity, so the rain is driven into your face at up to 200km/h. In a thundercloud, your chances of being hit by lightning are higher than on the ground because your wet body presents a more conductive path than the air around you.
Do clouds smell?
Lightning inside of clouds produces ozone“that’s the smell that tells you that a storm is on the way.
What is the average speed of a cloud?
Typically, clouds move at an average speed of 30-250mph. However, it can change according to the situation and wind conditions. There are different factors that influence the speed of cloud movement. For instance, at higher altitudes, the clouds tend to move faster than at lower levels.
How tall is a cloud?
High clouds have base heights of 3,000 to 7,600 meters (10,000 to 25,000 ft) in polar regions, 5,000 to 12,200 meters (16,500 to 40,000 ft) in temperate regions, and 6,100 to 18,300 meters (20,000 to 60,000 ft) in the tropical region.
Can a cloud touch the ground?
Some clouds are high up in the sky. Low clouds form closer to Earth’s surface. In fact, low clouds can even touch the ground. These clouds are called fog.
Would you be wet if you went through a cloud?
Even walking through a storm cloud would hardly drench you (though it would depend on where you walk). For a comparison, each of your feet can produce up to a pint of sweat a day.
Can a cloud freeze?
When the water drops get high enough in the sky, they encounter the colder temperatures at higher altitudes and freeze, even in the summer. Both water drops and ice crystals in a cloud are so small that they both look like white fluff from the ground.
Can we create a cloud?
In this activity, you can make your own cloud to see for yourself! Clouds form from the condensation or freezing of water vapor. Condensation is the process of a gas changing into a liquid. In this activity, the gas is water vapor and the liquid is the cloud you create.
What happens if you go into a cloud?
So, what happens if you skydive through a cloud? Well, it could be that nothing happens, or the consequences could be catastrophic. As you probably recall from middle school science, in essence, clouds are condensed water vapor, much like fog. Analogously to fog, within a cloud, visibility is significantly reduced.
Why is the sky blue for kids?
White light is made up of all colors of light. Nitrogen molecules scatter blue light more than they do the other colors. So a little bit of blue light bounces around in the sky and then enters our eyes. That makes the sky look blue.
Why are clouds dark?
Clouds appear dark when they are thicker and denser than normal clouds of a day of mild weather. As a cloud gathers more water droplets and ice crystals, it become thicker and allows less light to pass through it.
Is a rainbow cloud rare?
Cloud iridescence is relatively rare. The cloud must be thin and have lots of water droplets or ice crystals of about the same size. When that happens, the sun’s rays encounter just a few droplets at at time.
How long is 1 hour in space?
One hour on Earth is 0.0026 seconds in space. Thus, upon calculation we find that one hour on Earth is equivalent to seven years in space. Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity stands as a explanation to this calculation.
How cold is space?
Hot things move quickly, cold things very slowly. If atoms come to a complete stop, they are at absolute zero. Space is just above that, at an average temperature of 2.7 Kelvin (about minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit).
Can a plane accidentally fly into space?
So, to answer the question in short, airplanes CAN’T go into space.
How tall is the universe?
The comoving distance from Earth to the edge of the observable universe is about 14.26 gigaparsecs (46.5 billion light-years or 4.40×1026 m) in any direction. The observable universe is thus a sphere with a diameter of about 28.5 gigaparsecs (93 billion light-years or 8.8×1026 m).
How thick is our atmosphere?
The Earth’s atmosphere is an extremely thin sheet of air extending from the surface of the Earth to the edge of space. The Earth is a sphere with a roughly 8000 mile diameter; the thickness of the atmosphere is about 60 miles.
Where does the sky begin?
Re: Where does the sky begin and end? It begins at your feet and extends about 300 miles up. What we see as the sky is really an optical illusion caused by light being scattered by the atmosphere, in practice most of this scattering takes place in the air of the troposphere which is about 12 miles high.
Why do clouds float?
FLOATING CLOUDS. The water and ice particles in the clouds we see are simply too small to feel the effects of gravity. As a result, clouds appear to float on air. Clouds are composed primarily of small water droplets and, if it’s cold enough, ice crystals.