Clouds and Elephants

What weighs more, a cloud or an elephant? The answer is obvious, right? Well let’s take a look. The average elephant weighs about 6 tons (roughly 12,000 pounds). What does the average cloud weigh? What is an average cloud? Let’s take a small rain cloud.

Let’s start with a very simple white puffy cloud — a cumulus cloud. How much does the water in a cumulus cloud weigh? Peggy LeMone, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, did the numbers.

“The water in the little cloud weighs about 550 tons,” she calculates. “Or if you want to convert it to something that might be a little more meaningful… think of elephants.”

One rain cloud weighs about as much as 91.666667 elephants, okay lets say 100 elephants, I won’t Speak so Technically. 100 elephants, that’s a lot of weight. What keeps all that water floating up there?

“First of all, the water isn’t in elephant sized particles, it’s in tiny tiny tiny particles,” explains LeMone.

And those particles float on the warmer air that’s rising below. But still, the concept of so much water floating in the sky was surprising even to a meteorologist like LeMone.

This is all from just one cloud. Does this mean that the cloud has the force of 100 elephants? I don’t know but I would guess that it is somewhere near that destructive power. If we look at a hurricane, say the size of the state of Missouri, we can similarly calculate its size compared to elephants.

“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.

The result? Forty million elephants. 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.

That’s a lot of elephants. That’s a lot of water.

Source: ABCNews.com