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How Much Does A Cloud Weigh?
MyNameIsFred writes "ABC News is running an article revealing unexpected facts about weather formations. Ever wonder how much a cloud weighs? What about a hurricane? A meteorologist has done some estimates and the results might surprise you..." Reports that include the phrase "more than all the elephants on the planet" are always welcome.
Clouds are made of a lot of water. A lot of water is heavy. Clouds are heavy.
In other news, the sky is blue and grass is green.
It isn't saying much when you have to relate the measurement of weight to an elephant so the populous that reads it can grasp the magnitude of the number. In fact I find that rather pathetic...
++mse61--
I always knew that elephants could fly...
On whether it has a silver lining on not
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Assume an elephant weighs about six tons, she says, that would mean that water inside a typical cumulous cloud would weigh about one hundred elephants.
Somehow it reminds me of RIAA's math equivalent.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Or a physicist, or really a member of any pertinent field, but it seems to me that the last bit, about all the elephants ever, is pretty bogus science.
That makes no sense at all. A cloud is very little like a hurricane except that it involves water, air, and differentials of temperature and pressure.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In Soviet Russia, Cloud weigh YOU!
Speaking at Defcon 12 - Credit Card Networks Revisted: Pen
Doesn't anybody know that elephants are non-standard units? Give me something I can work with here, people. How many library of congresses would it take to equal the weight of a storm cloud?
Stephen
Fault loves the past, worry loves the future, but content enjoys the present.
Ones that float is not light,
Those who wander are not lost.
... the cloud is a witch! No wait, ducks not elephants. n/m
Who on earth is this written for? It says at the bottom that at least two people contributed to the report. The language is like that of a 4th grader. Is this what all ABC News reports look and/or sound like?
This makes the BBC seem like something written by Stephen Hawking.
A solution to the problem with music today
We are talking water. Water is very heavy. It is just that water in a cloud is in vapor form, and also floating in the sky that we sort of forget that it is still water.
And to be honest, the numbers (200,000 elephants in a storm cloud) don't shock me. Think of the destruction caused by floods, which are caused by rain. In some ways, it makes sense.
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
Assume an elephant weighs about six tons, she says, that would mean that water inside a typical cumulous cloud would weigh about one hundred elephants.
But how many LOCs is it?
Cecil Adams answered this a few years back. Sure he uses 747's instead of elephants, but his answer is a bit more detailed.
I wonder if she has ever considered just how hot is the sun. Wow, its hotter than all the space heaters that have ever been made turned on in the drying closet and you locked in for the whole weekend with only a bottle of soda and some salt crackers. Although by saturday night it would feel pretty much the same.
They use elephant weights in the article to make it easier to visualize. A Hurricane is 40 million elephants. That's just so much easier to visualize than 240 million tons (cubic meters) of water.
Jason
ProfQuotes
I'd guess it weighs about as much as Vaporware.
paintball
I see no reason why most people should have some natural appreciation of what "550 tons" actually means.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Yes, and I have a car that weighs over 1 trillion fleas.
Did I mention my laptop that must weigh over 50 field mice...
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
How much would it weigh if it was made of water?
How much does all the spam sent on the internet each day weigh?
Is there any place big enough to store it?
How much does the near vacuum in all the CRTs connected to the internet weigh?
How many ergs are there in all the electrons flying at all the CRT's on earth at any one instant?
The real question is how many midgets does an elephant weigh? If have 48 midgets per elephant, and I have 600 elephants per cloud, then....
This is my sig.
Are they Metric or Imperial elephants?
hurricanes are so destructive what with 200,000 elephants flying all over the place.
From the article "That means the water in one hurricane weighs more than all the elephants on the planet. Perhaps even more than all the elephants that have ever lived on the planet."
Assume an elephant generation is 50 years. Assume the average number of elephants in Africa at any one time is 100,000 (this will be way low historically). So, 40 million elephants are born in 400 generations, or only 20,000 years.
So there's no way this atatement "more than all the elephants that have ever lived on the planet" is correct.
When I was studying physics the lecturer was very insistent about us being able to do back of the envelope calculations - for example, how many photons does a 1.5 volt torch make on a full battery.
Cheers,
James
This opens up a whole new world of "your mom" jokes... "Your mom weighs as much as a cloud." How many people are gonna be able to figure that one out? :-D
GEE, I didnt know clouds have mass... and big ones weigh a lot??? Wow. But please, give me a measurent I can understand. How many kittens does a cloud weigh? I've never picked up an elephant.
Weigh? Forget weight! How much does one cost? I wouldn't mind having my own cumulonimbus hanging around.
Sure, it can do easy conversions like 1 pint in decilitres.
But can it do 1 cloud in elephants? No!
Perhaps Google isn't god after all.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
You missed the part about the clouds. ON-TOPIC. Sheesh.
Clouds are composed primarily of small water droplets and, if it's cold enough, ice crystals. The vast majority of clouds you see contain droplets and/or crystals that are too small to have any appreciable fall velocity. So the particles continue to float with the surrounding air. For an analogy closer to the ground, think of tiny dust particles that, when viewed against a shaft of sunlight, appear to float in the air. Indeed, the distance from the center of a typical water droplet to its edge--its radius--ranges from a few microns (thousandths of a millimeter) to a few tens of microns (ice crystals are often a bit larger). And the speed with which any object falls is related to its mass and surface area--which is why a feather falls more slowly than a pebble of the same weight. For particles that are roughly spherical, mass is proportional to the radius cubed (r3); the downward-facing surface area of such a particle is proportional to the radius squared (r2). Thus, as a tiny water droplet grows, its mass becomes more important than its shape and the droplet falls faster. Even a large droplet having a radius of 100 microns has a fall velocity of only about 27 centimeters per second (cm/s). And because ice crystals have more irregular shapes, their fall velocities are relatively smaller. Upward vertical motions, or updrafts, in the atmosphere also contribute to the floating appearance of clouds by offsetting the small fall velocities of their constituent particles. Clouds generally form, survive and grow in air that is moving upward. Rising air expands as the pressure on it decreases, and that expansion into thinner, high-altitude air causes cooling. Enough cooling eventually makes water vapor condense, which contributes to the survival and growth of the clouds. Stratiform clouds (those producing steady rain) typically form in an environment with widespread but weak upward motion (say, a few cm/s); convective clouds (those causing showers and thunderstorms) are associated with updrafts that exceed a few meters per second. In both cases, though, the atmospheric ascent is sufficient to negate the small fall velocities of cloud particles. Another way to illustrate the relative lightness of clouds is to compare the total mass of a cloud to the mass of the air in which it resides. Consider a hypothetical but typical small cloud at an altitude of 10,000 feet, comprising one cubic kilometer and having a liquid water content of 1.0 gram per cubic meter. 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! So, even though typical clouds do contain a lot of water, this water is spread out for miles in the form of tiny water droplets or crystals, which are so small that the effect of gravity on them is negligible. Thus, from our vantage on the ground, clouds seem to float in the sky.
Perhaps a more accurate method would be to extrapolate from the amount of water actually present in a cloud. A "cloud" isn't some well-defined object containing a set density of water. I'm sure a big puffy white one has a LOT less water than a big mean dark one that is the same size.
/. :-)
Then again, when we're talking about clouds... they're just concentrations of moisture that happen to refract and reflect visible light. The air has moisture everywhere. What exactly is the difference in moisture content between a cloud and a "really wet day" in the jungle?
I've seen it rain with very little cloud cover... So while we're at it, why not just weigh the air?
Or we could get around to other even more pointless activities... ANYTHING to get you on
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
I, for one, welcome our new meteorologist overlords!
...aren't one for humor, are you?
But really, from my vantage point on a hot humid evening, listening to the air conditioner's constant drip of water pulled from seemingly dry air, it is no surprise that the atmosphere holds a lot of water. If you consider that clouds form when the air is fully saturated with water it makes a lot of sense that a large thing like a cloud would have a large amount of water in it.
It floats, so it must weigh less than a duck.
......I'm a sad, sad little man.
they based the article on the attention span of elephants aswell...
And I guess you're just pissed off because you can't get any karma to speak of, eh?
Sucks to be you.
Picture this.. it's 2am and you're a Slashdot editor. The glow of your beautiful 21" LCD bathes you in 60-70hz of XF86 windowed goodness. Having beaten Mindbreaker 256+ times consecutively you decide to submit an article to the masses. Beside your lack of anything to do while the rest of us code/sleep/code in our sleep, you forgo reading the article to see if it contains anything worth reading at all.
*Post*
And now back to dragging and dropping little pins in place...
How about in volkswagen beetles?
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Since it is "floating in thin air", it has to be "lighter than air", wouldn't it? This would be the same principle that makes any boat "lighter than water" even though it might weigh thousands of tons.
/.'er down to the size of a pinhead, and he/she(/I) would be pretty heavy compared to any other pinhead.
And of course a condensed cloud would be prety heavy. You could compress any
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the TI is a superior machine.
That's what I think of these so-callled "geeks" with their so-called "Operating System" which goes by the name of LINUKS or such.
The phrase "Light as a cloud" doesn't make much sense to me anymore.
--- I w00t, therefore I'm l33t.
...isn't how much water in a cloud...
....rather how much vapor is in FWB Software?
(Mods, be gentle...)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Here in Japan it gets so humid that sometimes it rains without any clouds in the sky. I have always thought that was interesting.
If only we knew what the volume of the cloud was.
I expected to see:
Next Week on ABC NEWS!
Q: What weighs more: A pound of feathers, a pound of gold, or an article with important details missing?
A: The Article with important details missing will weigh you down more than feathers or gold! It also will wear you down faster than 3,004 sheets of sandpaper, and make you sigh more than another SCO press release!
Thanks for reading ABC NEWS! It's better than two buckets of ice cream!
You can get some sort of appreciation from thinking of one elephant and building from that to 100 elephants is a reasonable stretch.
However, if you start with a Big Mac, then the number you end up with (say 1 million?) is so large that you are left with something that is still difficult to visualise.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
What a retarded article.
of course on what the cloud looks like! An elephant, a pillow, a teddy bear, a plane, ...
Duh!
A 500 square meter area got an average rainfall of 3cm
500 * 100 = 50000 square cm
3cm * 50000 cm^2= 150000 cm^3
Pure Water having a specific gravity of 1.00
150,000 cm^3 * 1.00 = 150,000grams or 150Kg
Using the imperial system we have to resort to using inches, hands, feet, arms, britney spears, elephents, and the odd library of congress.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I couldn't resist. To hell with karma. . .
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
* yawn *
how original...
get's funnier each thousandth time some lame-o says that...
Great how they chose to represent things in elephants. I, for one, think we should all move towards an animal-based measurement system.
I've been wondering what the difference between insightful and pedantic was. Now if anyone asks, I can just link to this post.
If we're gonna do articles at this level, why not skip the written word and do the whole article in pictures, now that would be interesting.
"If it's lost, it'll turn up. Things always do" "I love it when a plan comes together"
Cowboy Neal Units??
What's under yellowstone?
It took quite a lot of research, but I did find out how much a flea weighs. It is approximately one millionth of a pound, or .000001 pounds. So, 1 trillion times 1 millionth of a pound would be... 1,000,000 pounds! It's closer to weighing as much as one billion fleas.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
550 tons is the weight of all the electrons that have been inconvenienced, although momentarily, by people who read this stupid article online, and then couldn't keep from posting on /. about how asinine it was. (Oops).
For that many electrons, we could have downloaded ourselves a few Libraries of Congress. Too late now, they're all wasted. We'll have to get the 20,000 CD-ROM worth of data delivered to our door by an elephant.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Looks like it's time to update /etc/units.dat
elephantweight 6 tons
hurricaneweight 40 million elephantweight
You have: 1 hurricaneweight
You want: scruples
* 1.68e+13
/ 5.952381e-14
you eat giant clams, but on Zoidbergs world giant clams eat you.
I thought that all scientific measurements had to be expressed in a number relating to VW Beetles.
I.e. The meteor that struck last night was roughly the size of a VW Beetle. etc.etc.
Who really comprehends how much Jumbo weighs? No one. The weight of clouds should be measured by the weight of guilt SCO should be feeling for their recent behavior. That's it! We'll measure weight in SCO guilt units! Let's see . . . that big hurricane weighs in a .012 SCO Guilt Units.
Hmmm, let me see if I can get this right.
Clouds are water vapor (duh).
Water is H2O... which means the molecule has 8 protons for O, and 2 for the H's, a "weight" of 12.
The majority of the atmosphere is N2, which has a total weight of 14. Thus, air containing water vapor is actually *lighter* than air without water vapor.
How can you say a cloud weighs more than all the elephants in the world, if it actually weighs less than air?
no comment
What is it with you and your freelance gig and moving your file?
Is that what professionial journalism has come to?Why must people keep abusing the phrase, "begs the question?" It does not mean "causes us to question" or "makes me wonder." Just because MANY people keep making the same mistake does not make it so.
</grammar nazo>
Peggy LeMone, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, did the numbers.
:))
Ah... only in The People's Republic of Boulder do people actually try to figure the weight of clouds.
(Probably only Coloradoans will get it. Fuck the rest of you
no comment
Of course the units would constantly change according to the state of health etc. of the vole, so all the energy devoted to stock market speculation could be rediverted to betting on commodity prices. It might make engineering and physics a bit difficult, but what the heck.
OK, that was a really stupid idea. So what does that make measuring things in elephant masses? Very, very stupid indeed.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Interviewer: "Mr. Torvalds, what would it take to get you to pay for an SCO license?"
Linus: More than all the elephants on the planet.
Earlier today, the RIAA announced that it would be suing filesharers. The damages? In dollars, more than all the elephants on the planet (if you sold them all at current market prices).
A new release of Mozilla Thunderbird is out. A huge party is planned. When the developers were asked how much ass the party would kick, the developers simply said, "more than all the elephants on the planet"
Here's one I'd like to know.
How much does all the air in the world weigh?
How many elephants, that is?
I wonder, how much of an elephant's weight is water?
Of course the sky is blue. Look out your window and see for yourself. The sky is the cause of it's own blueness (by scattering those wavelengths better), thus it is truly blue.
Perhaps you are thinking of the sun? One could argue that it is not really yellow, since outside of our atmospheric filter it is actually white.
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
Nah, clouds are not water vapor.
They are LIQUID water. And that's much heavier than air...
"(Score:0, Redundant)
I, for one, welcome our new -1, Redundant overmods."
Heh I, for one, welcome our new sarcastic overmods.
"Derp de derp."
No THAT's funny. :P
Try skydiving trough a cloud. The do indeed look fluffy and soft from an airplane, but when you fall trough them at 200-280kmh, it feels quite different.. All those small droplets hitting your bare skin feels like hundreds or thousands of small nails, and larger drops can be be painful trough thin clothing as well..
Not to mention hail within clouds. Hail is really, really painful. Skydivers really don't like hail. At all.
Volkswagen Beetles of water are in the cloud...thats what I really want to know
What about flying elephants?
Or are these reports written by a bunch of dumbos?
The thought of a hundred elephants-worth of water suspended in the sky begs another question -- what keeps it up there?
"First of all, the water isn't in elephant sized particles, it's in tiny tiny tiny particles," explains LeMone.
Ah, I see. So if I cut something heavy into lots of different pieces, I can make it float.
Weight is such a silly concept to even be discussing when it comes to clouds. It would be like weighing yourself underwater and listing that as your true weight.
A cloud weigh the same as a sheep without any legs.
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
The enerrgy consumed by a 250W computer over a year is an equivalent of 87.6 micrograms.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
-So, if it weighs as much as an elephant, it is made of ivory
Bedevere : And therefore ?
-A piano !!!
Crowd : A PIANO ! PLAAAAAYYYYY !
Hmmm, I wonder what these clouds would weigh as Cats and Dogs?... So after a Rainstorm you can think, "Hmm, It rained about 40 Dogs and 78 Cats last night."
Come on, cant we stick to tech here? stop duplicating what fark has already pointed out 12 hours ago. --dan
This is the most idiotic "scientific" article i've ever seen. The propensity for the american media to dumb things down to cater for their idiot population continually astounds me.
Perhaps the answer to the problem of teenagers dropping bricks from motorway and railway bridges is to sue Tetris.
was meant to fly on Monday but there were some high clouds, they thought that they could pick up some condensation that might freeze on the baloon, increasing it's weight by several tonnes and preventing them from reaching the altitude they were aiming for. They tried to launch it on Tuesday, but it burst.
lol - someone mod the parent up
So how can we use elephants to define hard disk space? If the base pairs of elephant DNA were expressed in megabytes...
Assuming the 1E6 ton storm cloud mentioned there (200,000 6-ton elephants) is about three kilometers across, or 25 cubic km, you get about 40 grams per cubic meter.
The density of air is about 1.2 kilograms per cubic meter, so the water does not contribute significantly to the mass.
Let's assume the 1E6 ton cloud rains down, entirely: (40 grams per cubic meter) x 3 kilometers is 120 kilograms (liters) per square meter, or about 120 mm of water. This is a lot, and shows that my 3 km is likely a lower limit.
Compare the 120 mm of water to atmosphere. The normal air pressure, which is about 760 mm of mercury. Multiplying with density (about 13 times more than water), you get about 10000 mm or ten meters, or ten tonnes.
Summarizing, the atmosphere is about two elephants per square meter.
It's raining frikin' elephants!!!
I couldn't have asked for a more beautiful mod reaction.
One elephant is about one CowboyNeal
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
I will remember those poor elephants next time I fly trough a cloud. ;-D
I hope, the plane doesnt bump into one
The checkbox said "Requires Windows 98, NT, or better. And so I installed Linux
Sir, if you're looking for an explanation, you should consider posting this in a few articles on ticalc.org and see what they have to say. (And yes, I know, you're trolling)
...for the 2004 edition of the Ig Nobels!
-- Serge K. Keller
Has anyone converted these figures into units we Brits can understand. Normally area here is expressed as multiples of the area of Wales (Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, uses this a lot). For smaller areas we use the Football (Soccer) pitch. Volume is a bit trickier as there is not a fixed unit but the volume of something is described by how many of the relevant objects would be needed to fill the Albert Hall. As for weight we need it as multiples of the England Pack (That's the eight guys in the scrum for you non-rugby players). So come on british mathematicians, your country needs you. How many England Packs does a typical raincloud over Lords Cricket Ground weigh, how many of them would be need to fill the Albert Hall and what fraction of the area of Wales would it cover ?
No but, yeah but, no but...
I know what a meter is and how long it is, but still convert it to feet before I can visulize it. i.e. a centimeter is about 1/3 of an inch, and a meter is a bit longer than a yard.
A centimetre is about 1/3 of an inch? Since when?
By any chance do you measure your penis in inches and then boast about its length in cm?
(6 in. = 15.24 cm, not ~18 cm as you seem to think.)
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
How much does a cloud weigh? ANSWER: The weight of a cloud is the weight of its constituent water droplets or ice crystals. The liquid water content and the ice content (specifically ice crystals, clusters of ice crystals [snowflakes], sleet, or hail) are measured in grams per cubic meter of air (g/m3). (1,000 grams equals 2.2 pounds.) Instruments on aircraft have measured the water content of many different types of clouds. The following liquid water contents are characteristic: -- small cumulus: 0.2-0.5 g/m3 -- larger cumulus: 0.5-1.0 g/m3 -- altocumulus/altostratus: 0.2-0.5 g/m3 -- stratus /stratocumulus: 0.1-0.5 g/m3
-- nimbostratus: 0.2-0.5 g/m3
In cumulonimbus (thunderstorm) clouds with very strong updrafts, liquid water contents can range as high as 5-15 g/m3.
In nonprecipitating clouds, droplets are numerous (hundreds per cubic centimeter [cm3]) and very tiny (perhaps 0.01 millimeter [mm] in diameter).
Despite their large numbers, the mass density of droplets in such clouds seldom reaches even 1 g/m3.
The ice content of cirrus clouds is even less, ranging typically between 0.05 and 0.50 g/m3. Cirrus clouds form at low temperatures, usually between -13 degrees F (-25 degrees C) and -76 degrees F (-60 degrees C). They consist of tiny, single crytals, whose concentration per cm3 is much lower than the concentration of droplets in warmer clouds.
Consider a cumulus cloud occupying a volume of one cubic kilometer (roughly 0.24 cubic mile)--not especially large as cumulus clouds go--and having an average liquid water content of 0.2 g/m3. The weight of this cloud would be 200,000 kilograms (440,000 pounds).
The condensed water in this cloud is enough to fill a large residential swimming pool. It is amazing that something this big and heavy can form from clear air within just a few minutes, but it is common in the atmosphere. A large thunderstorm could suspend 1,000 times more water (in the form of cloud droplets, rain, snow, and hail) than that found in a small cumulus cloud.
What keeps all this water weight suspended in the cumulus cloud? Indeed, why dont all clouds fall out of the sky? The reason is that updrafts suspend the cloud particles. In the case of the cumulus cloud, a typical drop radius is 0.01 mm. A drop this size falls at less than 0.5 centimeters per second (cm/s) in still air, so just the slightest updraft is sufficient to suspend droplets of this size.
Larger droplets fall faster. Drizzle droplets, for example, with radii ranging from 0.1 to 0.25 mm, fall at speeds of 100300 cm/s in still air. Strong updrafts of many meters per second are required to suspend raindrops or hail in a cloud.
Precipitation-sized particles, specifically those with radii greater than 0.1 mm, often fall from a cloud. Entering subsaturated air (where the relative humidity is less than 100 percent) below the cloud base, they evaporate during their downward journey, sometimes completely. The cloud itself can survive precipitation falling from its base provided that updrafts continue to promote condensation within the cloud. Downward air motion will quickly dissipate a cloud, for downward motion leads to compression of the air and an increase in temperature, which causes cloud droplets to evaporate.
I spent ages trying to think of sig, but never did
</ducks>
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
how original...
get's funnier each thousandth time some lame-o says that...
No, it gets more tiresom when some lame-o bitches about the unavoidable "I, for one, welcome our new X overlords" comment
YHBT YHL HAND moron
that the metric system is irrelephant?
You get the giant stepladder and I'll get the big bucket and scales...
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Have to shift my house to a underground bunker, cant imagine elephants falling from the sky!!
Weight is a unit of force.
:) I conclude that clouds, in fact, weigh absolutely nothing.
Since clouds float and do not come crashing down to the earth (except for fog perhaps
If they did, they would fall out of the sky. They have a mass, but no weight. Weight is the measure of the downward force a mass exerts. That is why you don't weigh as much on the moon. You have the same mass, but less weight. Clouds float, so they are weightless. If clouds had weight, you would need skyhooks to keep them up in the air.
ROFL..
Six tonnes are 6,000 kg, six tons is something different.
This is courtesy the Scientific American website. There is more information out there.
while it may be some kind of amazing technical achievment for science to "weigh" a cloud, quite frankly I couldn't care less. Essentially it's like asking the age old question ... "how long is a piece of string" ... it's just bloody pointless and dumb! /me reminds self of where I am ... oh yeah! That'd explain it.
Seems like nobody mentioned this before. Here seems to be a better source for the answer.
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
Botec analysis suggests a mere 3.62. That seems like pathetically few elephants. (1.25g/ft3 * 35.31 ft3/M3 * 500000 M3/JClifetime) / (1016047g/ton[long]* 6ton/elephant) (Julius' breath volume: http://members.brabant.chello.nl/~h.reints/caesar. htm)
(Botec analysis: http://www.lingo2word.com/lists/acronym_listB.html )
(weight of air: http://www.overflite.com/thermo.html)
less than a cloud.
nuf said!
...when you've got a father who's a physisist. With all his heart :)
We (brother, father, and myself) were lying in the sun on the beach, half asleep, when my brother (who also did Physics) said "I wonder how much these fluffy white clouds actually weigh."
So my father (also half-asleep) worked it out, mentioning that we all surely can doze better with all these tons floating serenely above us...
On a different point - why the heck are you people all so interested in Elephants? Ever seen any outside of some zoo? (I have, but I'm asking *you*).
Me, I use Texans as a weight unit. Such as: "my car weighs as much as two texans." (it does, too!)
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
Yeah, but how much do clouds weight when the unit of weight is elephant poo? And how does that change if the elephant has diarrhea?
How many libraries of congress do these clouds weigh?!
It just seems to be blue.
Grass isn't green in the sense that it "emits" "green" light. At sunset the light reflected from the lawn is red, but the grass still seems green.
Color is just a trick your brain uses to classify things. It doesn't have much to do with physical reality at all.
It's hard to believe, but well documented by experiment. Things don't have color. They just seem to.
This is the old misunderstanding of Mass vs Weight. If a cloud weighed 550 tons it COULD NOT BE LIGHTER THAN AIR. However a cloud is constructed of billions of tiny droplets of water that are lighter than air. The collective MASS of the cloud could be in the Millions of tons.
Meddle thou not in the affairs of Dragons, for thou art crunchy and with most anything.
Ever wonder how much a cloud weighs?
Not until I read this headline. Now I must know.
Ehh... Actually, 6 tons is exactly 6000 kilograms.
Ehh...what do you expect from a physicist? Actually I'd have expected that he'd said something like "6 tons are well in the range of 10^4 kilograms"....
So if, say, 10 cds = 1 lb, and 2500 lbs = 1 ton, then there are about 25k * 550 =~ 14 million CDs, and each one valued at $150,000 = 2,100,000,000,000! = half of the US annual GDP! So maybe the RIAA should start suing the clouds to make back their profit loss due to Cloudster and Elephantaa (and eElephant 2000)
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Elephants are all nice and good, but I can't really visualize it until it's converted into Human Genomes (the new trendy unit, Libraries of Congress are soo last millenium).
sic transit gloria mundi
According to the recents changes at the DMCA, you are not allowed to reverse engineere a cloud to know it's composition. Doing so can force you to pay up to 250,000$ per violation, and 6 month in prison. Think twice when you do such things
I for one welcome our fluffy over... nevermind.
But really, you don't understand how heavy they are until you've plummeted through a few on your head at 200+ mph. A word to the wise - as fluffy and good as they look, keep your mouth shut - water vapor hitting the back of your throat at 200 mph isn't as fun as it sounds.
Clouds float because the water droplets in them are tiny, and have a large surface-to-volume ratio. If the force caused by the friction of rising air currents on the droplet's surface is larger than the weight of the droplet, the droplet rises with the air. When the droplets increase too much in size, it rains.
And what if the air in the cloud isn't rising? Then the water droplets fall, very slowly. If they are too small to cause rain, when they reach lower layers of the atmosphere they evaporate, because air lower down is, normally, warmer.
How is it possible that there are 250 comments in this story, which describes a measurement involving the use of elephants, and there are still no swallow jokes? Like, are those African or or Asian elephants? And what do coconuts have to do with it?
C'mon, Slashdot, get it together. Or has everyone else outgrown this place?
--
$tar -xvf
Do a google on "John Allen Poulos" to see what "innumeracy" means. Read his book to see why it's important for everybody to know what numbers mean.
My grass needs a little (lot) of water...pretty danged brown right now.
But what I really want to know, is how do dreams weigh?
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Screw the RIAA. I wanna know what that is in Volkswagen Beetles!
No, no, no, you've got it all wrong... The correct unit to measure water is olympic-size swimming pools.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I'm having trouble grasping the elephant unit (get your mind out of the gutter, that's not what I mean). Does someone know the conversion from elephants to VW Bugs? Or are elephants units of mass and VW Bugs units of volume? I always get those mixed up.
But what about the density of those clouds. Those clouds are so heavy because they're really big, but if they were any denser than the air they displace, then they'd be down here instead of up there. So you could just as easily say "Oh my God! That cubic mile of empty air up there weighs 1.127x10^10 pounds!" (yes I did calculate that)
O.k. It was a nice little article till the end. How many people think in terms of elephants? Why not oil tankers or cars or finger nail clippings?
We're measuring the weight of clouds? Come on, how about the mass? And the density? ...And I guess the volume, just to round out that formula. The density of a cloud is very very low, less than the air around it (which is why it floats). The article is just a piece of pop science - useful trivia if you're trying to impress drunks at a frat party, but not the sort of thing intelligent people want to start their mornings with.
But it did get me thinking - since the clouds are less dense than air, there is less mass per cubic foot (or meter or whatever), so is the air pressure under a cloud lower? I know low pressure is indicative of a warm/cold front; are the two related?
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
This report was generated by a Cloud of Rabid Attack Elephants for headblur (692256).
I think that Elephants would have been around for more than 40 million years so it seems unlikely that less than 40 million have ever lived on the planet.
This sig is just as redundant as the rest of this posting
yes, but how many hogshead's of clouds does it take to move 40 rods?
MASS != WEIGHT
"Times may change, but standards must remain the same." - George Carlin.
"Ideally a measurement like this should be expressed in 'Cats and Dogs' as opposed to elephants."
if you are a Fortean (www.forteantimes.com), you should express this weight in 'sprats and cods'.
Could somebody please convert this to Library of Congresses (Libraries of Congress?). It's the only unit I understand.
Earl
a square meter is 100x100 square cm or 10000. So you have 500 * 10000 * 3 / 1000 = 15000kg
So a square km getting 3cm of rain would be 2000 times that (1000^2/500) which is 30 million kg.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
Skydivers really don't like hail. At all.
:)
They are lucky then that they haven't hit any of the elephants yet
That's good to know. Elephant-sized water particles are called 'ponds'.
Technically a huricane is a pinwheel formation of thunderstorm cells which are composed of clouds that are made up of water vapor. It might have been more clear if the article had just stuck to the mass of water vapor the air is capable of suspending, but I guess I'm splitting hairs...
Pavarotti has something to say about elephants... This comes from the person who made viking kittens sing and dance along to Led Zeppelin...
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
to me, it all means nothing until i know how many times they can write it on a head of a pin...
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
"Well I be done seen about ev-er-y-thing, when I see an elephant fly!"
A correction, if I may:
A comet with the mass of 7 billion cute fuzzy bunny rabbits is on a collision course with the Earth. I for one welcome our new fuzzy bunny overlords.
How much does fire weigh? I heard that it is a kind of acid, but I don't know much.
If you think that cloud is heavy, you should see the weight of the air underneath it...
Lately democracy seems to be based on the skybox, the Happy Meal box, the X-box, and the idiot box.
I heard there is a new SI unit called the emu. (Elephant Mass Unit) There has been some confusion, since emus probably aren't over 50kg.
Boy that Google calculator sure is smart:
http://www.google.com/search?q=550%20tons%20in%20e lephants
Returns the aforementioned article as the first hit!
--Grandpa Simpson
The Simpsons Episode 2F31 "A Star is Burns"
weighs more than all the elephants on planet earth.
... the pocket of air in which they exist is rising, or trying to rise in updrafts, usually due to thermal lift (can be ridge lift along terrain upslopes too).... this is especially true for cumulus clouds. In fact the cumulus clouds only come into existance because of the updrafts pushing humid air up until the thermal lapse rate (the temperature drop as altitude increases) causes the temperature in that particular rising pocket of humid air to drop at or below the dew point where the water vapor condenses then condenses out of solution and the cloud forms. Also the rising air has greater velocity and turbulence than the surrounding air and according to Bernoulli's Principal, faster moving air has lower internal pressure so our old friend "PV=nRT" comes into play and the pressure drop also helps the visible moisture condense out of solution, so we have two things contributing to the formation of a cumulus cloud: 1) temperature drop due to the lapse rate, and 2) pressure drop due to moving air. If you ever get the chance to fly right thru a puffy small cumulous cloud in a small airplane, you can really feel it, the cloud is a lot denser than you'd think, and right as you enter it, you feel the updraft and turbulence inside it. Clouds look so serene and peaceful from the ground or at a distance, even the cute little puffy ones, but inside them, they are actually quite violent.
"The water in the little cloud weighs about 550 tons," she calculates. "Or if you want to convert it to something that might be a little more meaningful ... think of elephants."
I'm having trouble imagining elephants. How much would a cloud weigh in Volkswagon Beetles?
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
...after all, we have the VW-Bug scale for meteorites!
Isn't it interesting how you come to recognize posters based solely on their sigs???
ABC has blown the lid off with this one. I couldn't have lived another day without this fascinating piece of news.
Express the power of a thunderstorm in racecar engines...show your work and all assumptions.
This was some time ago, but based on the Kalmogerov ?sp? microscale equations a 10km thunderstorm had the power of about 20 million 600HP racecars. Imagine a hurricane on the scale of 500km (since it is a size^3...if I recall correctly) ZOWIE!!
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
What does this mean? It means that water vapor actually weighs *less* than the air (mostly oxygen and nitrogen) it displaces.
Pilots care about this a lot -- they will calculate the density of the air where they are taking off, taking into account altitude, temperature, barometer reading and humidity. Using this information, they'll estimate how much space they'll need to take off, and how much weight they can safely take off with. If the humidity is high, this may mean that they must leave behind some fuel, cargo or passengers.
Of course, clouds are visible because some of the water vapor has condensed into tiny droplets of water, and that certainly does weigh more than the air it displaces. Water vapor is invisible -- droplets are not. Of course, if the droplets become too big, they'll fall as precipitation.
Now if only there was a way to tap that resource . . . Darn! I left my umbrella in the car!
Jonathan
THE SKY IS NOT BLUE
It depends on what your definition of "is" is.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
Consequently, this explains sunsets as well becuase when light from the sun has more atmosphere to travel though (such as when it's on the horizon), more photon are scattered. So when you look near the sun at sunset, the blue photons have mostly been scattered perpendicular to the direction of sun, leaving only the red photons to hit your eyes.
End of discussion. Anything more to be said about , "oh, but that doesn't really make it a color" is rediculous. The sky looks blue, so for all intents and purposes, it's blue.
All those small droplets hitting your bare skin feels like hundreds or thousands of small nails
So the lesson here is, don't strip naked and skydive through a cloud.
On a more serious note, I can't believe a scientist didn't differentiate between mass and weight, especially since weight varies inversely with distance (altitude), and clouds float at highly divergent altitudes. A cirrostratus cloud of a given mass will have noticeably less weight than a cumulous cloud of the same mass. Maybe low-altitude clouds are measured in African elephants, while high-altitude clouds are measured in Asian elephants?
I thought they were changing the posting system so n00bs like kdawg couldn't post as AC for a while after the article was posted. What happened to that? kdawg's such an asshole.
-donkey
Reports that include results like
10 * 10 * 10 * 100 = 200000
are never welcome.
We've educated a generation of journalists who are basically mentally retarded, and they're passing that cultural ethic on to our children.
In the process of revolutionizing our government every 4 years, we ought to do the same for the 4th Estate.
If a cloud weiighed anything at all, wouldn't we call it "fog" instead?
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
In fact:
The 100,000 elephants is low even for today. And as recently as 1970 there were an estimated 1.5 million wild elephants in Africa alone.
Fifty years isn't a bad guess for generations. this article puts life-span at 60 years... but, ater factoring in early mortality, historical average life was probably much, much lower.
Continuing back-of-the-envelope calculations:
Let's say that an average historical elephant population was two million...
... and average life-span was twenty years...
... and assuming an historical period of, say, ten thousand years...
Silly article.
Cecil Adams covered the question of how much a cloud weighs in "The Straight Dope" a long time ago. I just thought some folks might have some interest in his discussion of this question.
--
"And that's the world in a nutshell -- an appropriate receptacle."
-- Stan Dunn
What's sad is that the elephant population is dropping so rapidly, the final comment about the clouds in a huge storm weighing more than all of the elephants that ever lived isn't saying much.
Unlike elephants, there are more humans alive today than the total number of humans who have ever lived. Interesting contrast. I wonder how big of a storm that would be?
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
..does the cloud sized of 1000 volgswagens weight in elephants?
Weight is the amount of force exerted due to gravity. If these clouds weighed that much, they would come crashing down to the earth. Now mass, yeah, they have a large mass; but mass isn't weight.
No offense, but how dumb do you have to be to skydive in hail?
See that one over there? It must weigh at least as much as a hot-air balloon. No! I think it weighs as much as the Hindenberg did.
I hope Slashdot gets in a mass of trouble for posting this story.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Pretty dumb if you know youre jumping into hail when exiting the plane. If however, there have been no sign of hail on the ground (or on the way up) prior to the jump, the first time you know about it is when you hit the clouds with the hail.Unpleasant surprise.
A 70+mph roller coaster in the rain is pretty bad, too.
See, people were never afraid before when I'd tell them the sky was falling. Maybe after reading this they'll start listening to me.
how much is that in volkswagon beetles?
This supports the text in genesis, the first book in the bible, where it said God made the water above and the springs below break forth and create a flood.
5i9|\|3d, 5|\|ip3ri|\|di59ui53
In 30 years, I'll weigh more than all the wild elephants on the planet. Not because I'm stuffing myself for a Richard Simmons special, either... but because they'll be extinct.
if you wonder how water manages to get airborne, remember the molecular weights of the above molecules.
Water (molecules) is (are) lighter than air.
It's just that those molecular bonds make water molecules lock in pretty tight together, increasing their density until they begin to fall. But even then, strong updrafts can throw those drops up to 40,000 feet or more to make hail.
This means that a cloud would weigh DOUBLE the number of "half-elephants" !!!
> One could argue that it is not really yellow, since outside of our atmospheric filter it is actually white.
So the "atmospheric filter" makes white light shining through it yellow? When you have a predominantly translucent material, it's "color" is usually the color of light that shines through it. A yellow filter looks yellow.
So the sky could be called yellow, because it's a yellow filter, but then it's not absorbing other wavelengths like normal filters do. Or it could be called blue because it looks blue, but is the scattering of blue wavelengths the same as reflection?
Materials can have different colors, they can simultaneously reflect light, filter it, refract it, and maybe some other stuff too why not... So I'd say either this discussion is way over my head, or the sky has multiple color properties.
Heard on NPR:
"The stars are a long, long way away. But that's good, because they're _really_ hot."
If my calculations are correct, the big storm cloud could cover 30 square km with 1 cm of rain. Not so amazing. In fact, the figures are so close that I would suspect the original calculations were done in metric and converted to tons and elephants.
...then by your argument nothing has any color because it simply refracts/reflects certain colors of light.
If you add up molecular weights and use the gas laws (PV=nRT), youll find that water vapor -- which is what clouds are made of, until they rain out -- is lighter than air.
The gas laws tell you basically that when P and T and R are constants, as they are in any small region of the atmosphere, the volume is proportional to the number of moles of gas that you have. I don't know how many cubic meters of gas make up a mole, up in the clouds, but I know it's a constant, and... a mole of N2 (nitrogen gas, which makes up 60% of the air) weighs 28 grams, and a mole of O2 (oxygen) weighs 32 grams, and a mole of CO2 (carbon dioxide) weighs 44 grams. But a mole of H20 weighs in at only 18 grams. So, water is lighter than air.
This is why barometric pressure decreases when clouds are overhead.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
The proper quote should be:
For extremely bad news, they could pick something friendly or cute to reference, such as "A comet with the mass of 7 billion cute fuzzy bunny rabbits is on a collision course with the Earth. I, for one, welcome our new cute fuzzy bunny rabbit overlords."
The article mentions the fact that clouds float because the water in them is dispersed into zillions of tiny little particles. This suggests an interesting technique for making elephants float... yes, pulverize them into zillions of tiny particles, and they'll float!
No idea on whether the concept would work with, say, G.W. Bush, but it might be worth trying.
I was disappointed to find nobody considered the weight of the bacteria within the clouds. Cloud condensation nuclei can be windblown dust, sea-salt, or exhaust from combustion... but a large fraction of the condensation nuclei are also bacteria. In a sense, bacteria create clouds to produce local energy differentials that will convey them enormous distances to a new locale, whereupon the clouds release the bacteria embedded in raindrops and the bacteria fall to the ground to find new food sources and begin multiplying again. In a very real sense, when you see fluffy white clouds, you are looking at the migratory reproductive organs or bacteria, and when it rains you are getting a bacterial bukkake.
Da Blog
African or European elephants? Hmmm I don't know..... Ahhhhhhhhhh!
okay so when i look at my bleeding arm, i would say my blood isnt red but really purple. its just because some mad science made it look so. when i look up at the sky, im not really seeing blue but some mad science is cheating my eyes. tsk tsk. the trouble with you propeller heads is that u are way too _intelligent_ to distuinguish simple things from one to another. utterly useless brains for practical use.
It should be called blue simply because it looks blue most of the time. It is a red/yellow filter, though. But unlike "normal" filters it does not absorb the wavelengths that are filtered, but instead scatters them, redistributing that color all over the rest of the sky.
IMHO things have the color that we percieve them to have, with the possible exception of cases where there is an obviously more pure way of experiencing them, as in the case of the yellow sun.
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
I was very near to a Cloud Burst in the Hill state of Uttaranchal in India in Aug/Sep of 2002. The horror and fury of cloud burst is intense. The number of elephants counted here is peanuts. Its like this (eeks. Troll talking) get the Tank Mr.Cecel B .DeMille used for Ten Commandments ( Read Sea Parting). Suspend it a few feet away (filled with water), invite all the folks, serve them cocktails, get everybody mellow and then break the bottom of the tank. :-:
The speed and volume that pours out of a cloud in one instant still cooks my goose. It completely washed away a side of the mountain.
sd
part of the parcel !
pseudo mod: "+1 HHOS"
I'm confused. How is dealing with sqrt(2) elephants any easier than a pure, unlabeled sqrt(2)?
Although, I admit it is fun to try to imagine them... it.. whatever...
Furry cows moo and decompress.