Found out that a single cumulonimbus cloud can weigh as much as 100 elephants

I was scrolling through some weather science blog my buddy linked me to, and it said a typical thunderstorm cloud holds around 500,000 tons of water. That blew my mind because I always thought clouds were just this light fluffy stuff floating around. Been roofing for years and I look up at clouds every day, never realized each one has that much mass behind it. Has anyone else stumbled on a cloud fact that totally wrecked how you see them?

2 comments

2 Comments

avery_fox9319d ago

Hang on though, I gotta push back on that. Those numbers sound dramatic but 500,000 tons of water suspended in the air is not really the same as that weight pressing down on something. It's spread out over a massive area, miles wide and tall. The density is still super low, like a fraction of a gram per cubic meter. So yeah it's a lot of water total, but each fluff part of the cloud is still mostly air and tiny droplets. It doesn't change how I see them at all because they're still basically just floating mist when you're actually in one.

hugog4319d ago

You saying "floating mist" just reminded me of this one time I was hiking in the Rockies with my buddy @avery_fox93 and we walked right into a cloud bank near the top. It was like being in a cold, wet washing machine for ten minutes, visibility was maybe twenty feet. I remember thinking how wild it was that all that moisture was technically part of this giant thing in the sky, but up close it felt like nothing. That's the thing with clouds, they really are just the universe's way of playing a trick on your sense of scale.