Cloud: Cotton Candy or Floating Iceberg?

It’s almost magic to see the white, cotton-like shape in the sky, moving gently above us. But sometimes it rains. Sometimes it snows… a lot… covering houses and trees, making roof collapse and branches bend and crack. All this mass was up there? Floating? What is a cloud?

Our Sun makes water evaporate from the oceans, lake and other exposed water, but also from the land, which contains a lot of moist too. As for the livings, perspiration from plants is a major contributor too.

All this evaporated water raise in the air, and as it goes up, it cools down then condense and agglomerate around any flying particle – dust, ash, etc… - and eventually freeze…

So a cloud is basically a massive mix of dirt, and billions of water and ice droplets.

How comes it just doesn’t fall down back to the ground? Simply because the cloud is just a little bit less dense (1.003 kg/m3) than the surrounding air (1.007 kg/m3 at this altitude – reminder at sea level, it is 1,275 kg/m3) – so it literally floats in the air… following the air streams.

But then, it should also spread around, no? Well, yes… would it not for the electro static force pulling this all mass together. However, sometimes the tiny droplets get too big and too heavy and cannot stay floating… it rains.

Now, back to the main question: heavy or not heavy?

Well, at micro scale, we just saw that it has a “light” density, so "not heavy".

But at macro scale, it a different story… and it all depends on its size. A regular cumulus, for instance can weight 1,000 tons only. However, a cumulonimbus -storm clouds - can be 500,000 tons of water, similar to an average sized iceberg! It can even go up to 1,000,000 tons when forming into a 50km2 storm.

And for multi-cellular storm, count for a 25 million tons – similar to a giant 200mx75m iceberg! Pretty heavy...

So, small cloud is a small iceberg and massive cloud is a massive iceberg… Although they look like light cotton candy, they are actually more like floating iceberg…

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