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.

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.

Re:NEWS ALERT (Summary)

[digitalunity]

That's why I never listen to the news.

The sky isn't blue at all. Sunlight shining through our atmosphere makes it appear blue. Evidence of this is any sunset; then it isn't blue at all.

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)

[digitalunity]

Unfortunately. I would much prefer a more sophisticated color like red or blue. Green just isn't a very pretty color.

Re:NEWS ALERT (Summary)

[popeyethesailor]

No, it should be Grue 8)

Re:NEWS ALERT (Summary)

[meta-monkey]

Extremely smarmy engineer answer:

<smarm>
Well, grass isn't actually green, per say. Nothing really IS a color, it's just that grass happens to absorb all the wavelengths of light except those around 500-570 nanometers, which is reflected instead. Now, when this reflected light enters our eyes, our brains percieve it as the color we call "green." I hope that clears things up for you.
</smarm>

Re:Nonsense

[CyberDruid]

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.

Re:NEWS ALERT (Summary)

[TummyX]

Grass isn't green. Sunlight reflecting off it makes it appear green. Evidence of this is at nighttime; the it isn't green at all.

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: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:NEWS ALERT (Summary)

[digitalunity]

Hold still and this won't hurt a bit:

THE SKY IS NOT BLUE. Ok? The sky is composed of nitrogen and oxygen in large proportions. Both are transparent materials in gaseous form. They do, however, refract light like a prism. The fact that it appears blue is a matter of where on earth you are in relation to the sun. During a sunset, the sky is not blue and red, it is some shade in-between. As the light is refracted through the atmosphere, the color changes. If the sky were really blue, the moon and the stars at

Re:NEWS ALERT (Summary)

[Idarubicin]

The sky is composed of nitrogen and oxygen in large proportions. Both are transparent materials in gaseous form. They do, however, refract light like a prism.

They do indeed--but that has precious little to do with why the sky is (usually) blue. Refraction occurs when light passes from a medium with one refractive index into another, and bends in so doing. There are lots of websites [missouri.edu] on the topic. The amount of bending that occurs depends on the material and on the wavelength of the light. Typically, materials have a higher index of refraction for shorter wavelengths [asu.edu]--this dependence of refractive index enables prisms to separate light into component colours.

The apparent colour of the sky depends not on refraction (air has an index of 1.003, only a shade more than vacuum's 1.000) so light bends very little passing through the atmosphere. The important effect is Rayleigh scattering [gsu.edu]. Light with shorter wavelengths is scattered much more strongly--red and yellow light from the sun follows a fairly direct path to the viewer, so the sun appears as a yellow disc. Blue light is scattered repeatedly by the atmosphere, resulting in a diffusely blue sky. Interestingly, if you take a long exposure photograph on a moonlit night, the sky will still show up as blue from scattered moonlight.

Incidentally, I would call the 'sky' blue, even though the gases of the atmosphere are (except around cities) colourless. That's the colour you see when you look up, in the direction of what a layperson would call the sky. Oh, and I am a physicist.

If you look at a blue ball through the edge of a prism and it looks red, is the ball still blue? I think so.

If you look at a 'blue' ball through the edge of a prism, it will look blue or black--if it reflected large amounts of red light, then it wouldn't appear blue without the prism in the first place.

I would call you a pedant, if you were right.

I would still call you a pedant--and a condescending one, at that--even though you're a little iffy on scattering of light. If you would like some further pedantry, I would be pleased to explain why the sky is red at sunset.

Re:NEWS ALERT (Summary)

[digitalunity]

The word 'Sky' is an Old Norse word. It mean's cloud. It came into the common english language around the year 1100. You are absolutely correct that they aren't synonymous. 'Sky' is usually referring to our atmosphere from the vantage point of earth, but in either case, it is referring to the same thing.

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: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

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:Clouds don't "weigh" anything

[ninthwave]

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.

water IS heavier than air

[mangu]

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.

Water (vapor) is lighter than air

[Sunlighter]

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

sad

[mse61]

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...

Re:sad

[lpret]

no kidding, how did this get on slashdot? I've seen huge discussions of Tesla coils by people who design them for a living, and here we're talking about a cloud being heavy -- give me abreak.

I find your sense of superiority pathetic.

[Chuck Chunder]

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

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:550 tons

[Idarubicin]

550 tons of electrons;
divided by 9.1E-34 tons per electron;
divided by 6.02E23 electrons per mole;
divided by 96485 moles of electrons per amp.second;
divided by 3600 seconds per hour;
multiplied by 110 volts distribution;

Gives 318 kWh in 550 tons of electrons, delivered to your door in North America, or twice as much energy in Europe.

If you're drawing 400 watts for computer and modem;
and you wasted fifteen minutes on this story;

That's only 3200 readers to use up 550 tons of electrons. Of course, since we're using alternating current, those readers had to return the electrons for reuse by other /.ers. :D

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: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.

The trick, I expect, is to keep numbers low

[Chuck Chunder]

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.

Re:sad

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

Re:Math?

[Soul-Burn666]

I always thought the clouds and vapor are more like SCO's claims equivelant ;)

Re:Math?

[AntiOrganic]

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

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.

I am not a meteorologist

[drinkypoo]

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.

"What we're doing is weighing the water in one cubic meter theoretically pulled from a cloud and then multiplying by the number of meters in a whole hurricane," she explains.

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.

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: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

Re:Units Units Units

[DCowern]

forty rods to the hogshead... and that's just the way I like it!

Re:Units Units Units

[good-n-nappy]

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

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.

Bad Mathematician....no cookie

[Kris Warkentin]

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.

Re:Metric Metric Metric

[zakezuke]

That would explain the surplus elephents plummiting outside, and no britney spears.

Re:Units Units Units

[commodoresloat]

if it can't be measured in cubits, I don't want it measured at all.

Re:Units Units Units

[h00pla]

To paraphrase David Letterman: How much would a cloud weigh if it were filled with hail stones the size of canned hams?

That's it...

[Fatllama]

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

Target Audience?

[i_am_nitrogen]

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.

Re:Target Audience?

[Tokerat]

...perhaps that's so it may be used in a 4th grade science class? Honestly, I don't think this is exactly hard-hitting journalism targeted at America's most prominent adult citizens...

It's just a neat little factoid little Billy can print and bring to teacher for extra credit. Also, an interesting fact, if it's something you never considered before.

Re:Target Audience?

[morganjharvey]

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

This surprises you?

[rblancarte]

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.

Re:This surprises you?

[rew]

Water in a cloud is no longer in vapor form. The water in the air below the cloud is generally in vapor form. It's transparent, as opposed to whitish when it's in small particles.

The weight of the water in a unit of volume of air just below your standard cumulus cloud is about the same as the weight of the water-vapor in the could.

Anyway, your standard cloud being 1km x 1km x 200m, the weight of the AIR in that cloud comes to 1.2 kg/m^3 * 1000*1000*200 / 1000 kg/tonne= 240 thousand tonnes. That should be

An earlier answer

[staplegun]

Cecil Adams answered [straightdope.com] this a few years back. Sure he uses 747's instead of elephants, but his answer is a bit more detailed.

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.

Re:Surprised

[el-spectre]

Interestingly, the surface of the sun is cooler (10,000 F) than some of the temperatures that we can create in a lab on earth.

The core is in the tens of millions of degrees, so no challenge there.

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:40 million elephants.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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...

The Weight of A Flea

[driftingwalrus]

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.

More Imponerables

[Lucas Membrane]

How much does the internet weigh?

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?

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:More Imponerables

[bigberk]

How much does the internet weigh?

An electron's mass is 9.109 * 10^-31 kg (I was surprised to see that google told me this [google.ca] directly). Now let's say you focus on just a single 10 gigabit router. How many bits flow through one of these in a year? That's (10 * 10^9 bits/sec) * (31.5 * 10^6) s = 3.15 * 10^17 bits. Each bit, we can assume, involves the flow of several million electrons. So we're talking about something like 10^23 electrons flowing through a large router, per year.

Obviously there are many route

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?

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.

No wonder

[cyril3]

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

Don't you hate people who can't estimate?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

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.

Weigh?

[Jippy_]

Weigh? Forget weight! How much does one cost? I wouldn't mind having my own cumulonimbus hanging around.

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.

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.

Why do clouds float?

[Aaron England]

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.

More accurate methods

[StewedSquirrel]

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

Cloudless Skies

[chiasmus1]

I've seen it rain with very little cloud cover... So while we're at it, why not just weigh the air?

Here in Japan it gets so humid that sometimes it rains without any clouds in the sky. I have always thought that was interesting.

Obligatory Simpsons Quote

[henriksh]

I, for one, welcome our new meteorologist overlords!

How about in

[xintegerx]

How about in volkswagen beetles?

Heavy - relative to what?

[cra]

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.

And of course a condensed cloud would be prety heavy. You could compress any /.'er down to the size of a pinhead, and he/she(/I) would be pretty heavy compared to any other pinhead.

The question...

[Tokerat]

...isn't how much water in a cloud...

....rather how much vapor is in FWB Software [fwb.com]?

(Mods, be gentle...)

There is no cloud. . .

[cra]

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

But how much will a cloud weigh in..

[abhikhurana]

Cowboy Neal Units??

confused....

[zapp]

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?

The grammar nazi does not approve

[ls -lR]

<grammar nazi hat on>
Is that what professionial journalism has come to?

The thought of a hundred elephants-worth of water suspended in the sky begs another question -- what keeps it up there?

Why must people keep abusing the phrase, "begs the question?" [2blowhards.com] 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>

Only in Boulder...

[zapp]

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 :))

Re:Only in Boulder...

[zapp]

Let me rephrase....

Only in the People's Republic of Boulder would they compare clouds to elephants. Damn hippies.

Perhaps slightly OT

[panurge]

This reminds me of the idea of replacing the SI system by the unit vole system. A vole would be kept in a special cage at Paris. The unit of mass would be its mass, the unit of length its length (over tail for preference) and the unit of power the energy it put into running round the treadmill, if that's what voles do.

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 commodit

Re:Perhaps slightly OT

[Detritus]

I like the idea of a vole system. Of course we would have to define the standard vole to make it useful.

Measurement systems need to have some relevance to the everyday world. Just look at the metric system, they based the length of the meter on a bad measurement of the size of the Earth, an otherwise insignificant planet. Things went downhill from there. We could have done just as well by digging up an old king and measuring the length of his forearm.

Imagine that you are shipwrecked on a previously undi

Getting up close and personal with those elephants

[Infensus]

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.

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 :)

African, Asian or....

[geoff lane]

What about flying elephants?

Or are these reports written by a bunch of dumbos?

Weight?

[anthony_dipierro]

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.

Er

[cca93014]

A cloud weigh the same as a sheep without any legs.

In other news

[Alex Belits]

The enerrgy consumed by a 250W computer over a year is an equivalent of 87.6 micrograms.

The obligatory Monty Python reference

[stud9920]

-So, if it weighs as much as an elephant, it is made of ivory
Bedevere : And therefore ?
-A piano !!!
Crowd : A PIANO ! PLAAAAAYYYYY !

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 ?

Another - better - source

[neglige]

Seems like nobody mentioned this before. Here [noaa.gov] seems to be a better source for the answer.

Ridiculous

[WebMasterJoe]

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?

Re:Its an Addiction

[drinkypoo]

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

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.