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.

Don't be afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, welcome our new meteorological overlords.

NEWS ALERT (Summary)

[error502]

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 knew it

[Kshu]

I always knew that elephants could fly...

Depends

[Timesprout]

On whether it has a silver lining on not

Math?

[robbyjo]

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.

Units Units Units

[NASAKnight]

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

Re:Its an Addiction

[drinkypoo]

1. Fail to correctly type your joke which you think is clever.
2. ?
3. Profit!

That's it...

[Fatllama]

... the cloud is a witch! No wait, ducks not elephants. n/m

Re:Math?

[AntiOrganic]

I would imagine that a zookeeper at a particularly large zoo, or perhaps safari, would weigh one hundred elephants.

Surprised

[cyril3]

I'm surprised a meteorologist can get through a degree and on the job training and after all that be surprised just how much water there is in a hurricane.

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.

40 million elephants.

[Jason1729]

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 [profquotes.com]

Re:Units Units Units

[g0at]

Actually, my favourite high school math teacher (in fact one of the best profs I'd ever had) typically spoke in units of elephants, when trying to illustrate concepts involving quantities that were otherwise hard to relate to.

(e.g. "imagine I have root two elephants sitting on the floor here, and then multiply the imaginary part...")

-ben

I don't know...

[raehl]

I'd guess it weighs about as much as Vaporware.

Elephants Smelephants...

[Ironix]

Yes, and I have a car that weighs over 1 trillion fleas.

Did I mention my laptop that must weigh over 50 field mice...

Re:Math?

[error502]

If that were actually RIAA math, one cloud would weigh about one elephants. You have to take into account how old they are. A really old elephant is equivalent to two middle-aged elephants. You also have to take into account if they know any circus tricks. The elephants that know circus tricks are equivalent to the weight of five regular elephants. Then there are the wild elephants, which are the equivalent of ten elephants that grew up in zoos.

How do you convert that to midgets?

[tjstork]

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....

Elephant Units

[questamor]

Are they Metric or Imperial elephants?

No wonder

[cyril3]

hurricanes are so destructive what with 200,000 elephants flying all over the place.

Wow...

[DCowern]

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

Google failure

[Chuck Chunder]

Sure, it can do easy conversions like 1 pint in decilitres [google.com].

But can it do 1 cloud in elephants [google.com]? No!

Perhaps Google isn't god after all.

Obligatory Simpsons Quote

[henriksh]

I, for one, welcome our new meteorologist overlords!

Re:NEWS ALERT (Summary)

[error502]

*Gasp!* The sky isn't actually blue! My world has been shaken! ...Grass is still green, right? ;-)

Re:NEWS ALERT (Summary)

[Negative Response]

Um, I read the article, and doesn't it say clouds are made of elephants? Millions of them?

Re:Elephant Units

[Pompatus]

Are they Metric or Imperial elephants?

Definately Imperial elephants. Since we're talking about clouds, they have to be storm trooper elephants.

Re:Google failure

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it can tell you Planck's constant in stone-Smoot-parsecs per fortnight [google.com] so I wouldn't be so quick to judge.

aparrently

[Anonymous Coward]

they based the article on the attention span of elephants aswell...

Re:Units Units Units

[good-n-nappy]

I was just thinking... could someone convert that to blue whales for me?

Re:sad

[Anonymous Coward]

...where "most" means "those of us who are still stuck in the non-metric Stone Age".

Re:Units Units Units

[Anonymous Coward]

Ideally a measurement like this should be expressed in 'Cats and Dogs' as opposed to elephants. :)

Metric Metric Metric

[zakezuke]

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 cloud. . .

[cra]

I couldn't resist. To hell with karma. . .

Re:What about the illiterate populous

[Solo-Malee]

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.

550 tons

[SysKoll]

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 [jamesshuggins.com] delivered to our door by an elephant.

Re:Wow...

[TheLoneDanger]

That's the beauty of it, if he doesn't get it, then he'll just be confused. If he does get it then he is a Slashdotter or a meteorologist and you'll have a whole lot more ammunition to mock him with.

Re:I find your sense of superiority pathetic.

[NanoGator]

"I see no reason why most people should have some natural appreciation of what "550 tons" actually means."

Must... resist.. yo mama.. joke...

Re:I find your sense of superiority pathetic.

[RALE007]

I see no reason why most people should have some natural appreciation of what "550 tons" actually means.

I know how much 550 tons is, that's like

The weight of 9,500 ex girlfriends, or 550 ex girlfriends if you live in Utah.

The amount of shit expelled in the average SCO press release.

The weight of my formerly miniscule equipment after I replied to *every* penis enlarging piece of spam I've ever received.

Since they insist on reporting on the weights of things relative to others, instead of just sticking to a standard unit of measurment, I say the pick more interesting objects than VW Bugs or Elephants. For instance:

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 can't wait for the bunnies to get here!"

For scientific news trying to get your average Joe Blows attention for future (hopeful) government funding; "In other news, a space probe weighing as much as 170 pairs of Pamela Andersons breasts was launched at Mars today. The rocket carrying the probe created a massive 18,000lbs of thrust to get the probe headed on its way. Although there is a slight possibility of damage to the delicate probe, the 18,000 pounds of thrust must be used on the mass of Pamela Andersons tits to enable it to build up enough speed, faster and faster as it goes, to escape the Earths gravity. I'm sure every man involved is very proud at the success and has a special feeling at the moment."

Etc. Lame, but fun, try making your own.

Re:Target Audience?

[morganjharvey]

I guess that this is what they refer to as a "fluff" piece...
<grin>
I'll go away now...

Re:Don't be afraid

[NanoGator]

"(Score:0, Redundant)

I, for one, welcome our new -1, Redundant overmods."

Heh I, for one, welcome our new sarcastic overmods.

Re:Thank you, Digitalunity.

[anthony_dipierro]

That post was not insightful. It was just the combination of certain letters and punctuation that made it appear insightful.

Re:I find your sense of superiority pathetic.

[JohnsonWax]

Don't lose any sleep over it. I see no reason why most people should have some natural appreciation of what an elephant actually weighs unless they've had to carry or eat one.

Me, years of studying physics allows me to convert among numerous units of measure including the ever useful library of congresses, empire state buildings, highways to the moon, and popes in a volkswagon, but even so I'd sure as hell be suprised if 6 tons of anything showed up in my backyard, be it cloud, elephant, or bird shit.

To me, 6 tons is about 5,000 kilos (grew up in the U.S., but I think in metric - how screwed is that) or about 5 of my car or 25 Powermatic table saws. It's all relative to what you're brain has stored. I've moved my table saw and I've had my foot run over by my car, so I have a direct appreciation for the weight of both, but not an elephant, or 6 tons as such.

Re:More Imponerables

[nacturation]

How much does all the spam sent on the internet each day weigh?

Is there any place big enough to store it?

Yes: /dev/null

Re:NEWS ALERT (Summary)

[jerde]

Wait...wait... slow down...

Water? has Weight? But they look fluffy!

Next you're going to try to tell me that the very air we breathe has weight, too. Bah. Silliness.

- Peter

Re:I find your sense of superiority pathetic.

[Anonymous Coward]

well, you cant say he is dumb.He ran his car over his own foot and i cant think of a way to easily do that.

Re:NEWS ALERT (Summary)

[not_from_here]

the really good grass is actually kinda yellowy although some are shot through with red or purple.

British Units ???

[DataCannibal]

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 ?

So you're saying....

[Anonymous Coward]

that the metric system is irrelephant?

I'm sure we can work it out between us...

[WIAKywbfatw]

You get the giant stepladder and I'll get the big bucket and scales...

Re:40 million elephants.

[Anonymous Coward]

So it looks like rain. Should I take an umbrella or an elephant gun?

Physicist

[i_really_dont_care]

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"....

DMCA Violation!!!

[Ummite]

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

Re:NEWS ALERT (Summary)

[glyph42]

Then my shirt is not red, and my pants are not beige, because when I turn off the light, they're all black, right? Or if I shine blue light on them, they look blue! Wait, but that blue light is black if I turn it off, so it cannot be blue! In fact, nothing is any color! There are no colors at all! Revelation! Ack! I can't see!

Re:Getting up close and personal with those elepha

[Anonymous Coward]

Skydivers really don't like hail. At all.

They are lucky then that they haven't hit any of the elephants yet :)

Re:NEWS ALERT (Summary)

[drakaan]

You can all relax. I asked my daughter to go outside and check (three times, to be certain). She informs me that it's blue today.

She's 4, and not easily swayed by long arguments, but she does agree that occasionally it's reddish-orange, and at night it's black.

More relvant obSimpsonQuote:

[Rorgg]

"My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I like it!"

--Grandpa Simpson
The Simpsons Episode 2F31 "A Star is Burns"