Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.'"
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.
... 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
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
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.
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
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!
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.
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/
That post was not insightful. It was just the combination of certain letters and punctuation that made it appear insightful.
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.
How much does all the spam sent on the internet each day weigh?
/dev/null
Is there any place big enough to store it?
Yes:
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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...
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
The do have weight because the have a downward force from the relation of their mass within the gravity of earth. But because of their low density they float in the air. Just like a feather has weight but still floats in the air currents.
All objects that have a mass have weight. Weight is related to the gravitational conditions the object is in. You are confusing weight and density / buoyancy.
Physics 101 please try this class again.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
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.