“Light as a cloud” might not make much sense after realizing that clouds are much heavier than one might think! According to scientists, the weight of an average cloud is 1.1 million pounds or 500,000 kilograms!
A cumulus (certain type of cloud) is a kilometer long and a kilometer tall. This gives you a cloud that’s one billion cubic meters in volume. This means that at any given moment, there are millions of pounds of water floating above your head. That’s the equivalent of hundreds of elephants.
About 70% of rain which falls in our planet comes from water that has evaporated over our oceans. When warm air rises, it expands and cools thus vapor condenses onto tiny pieces of dust that are floating in the air and forms a tiny droplet around each dust particle. When billions of these droplets come together they become a visible cloud.
But no worries! 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. So, the weight isn’t all concentrated in one point, but it is rather spread floating out over a huge space.
But how does one measure a could`s weight?
Cloud droplets are spherical and the density of water is known, so the number and size of the droplets can be measured in a known volume (usually one cubic centimetre). Multiply this by the total volume of the cloud and you can calculate its weight.
