If clouds are mostly water vapor, and water is heavier than air, why are the clouds up there?

Answer 1

Water vapour is a colourless, transparent gas - so clouds are quite clearly not made of it.

Clouds are indeed made of small drops of water. They stay up becaus of convection. Clouds can only be stable where there is an updraft to counter the slow drift down of the water droplets under gravity.

There are two basic types - stratiform which are stable and supported by a constant updraft and convective in which you can actually see the churning effect of convection if you look.

Answer 2

Actually, clouds aren't water vapor. They are liquid water that has condensed out of warm, moist air. They stay up there for a number of reasons.

First of all, the water droplets are very tiny, they don't weight much more than a typical mote of dust, and so gravity is not a huge factor compared to the movement of the air. Furthermore, the surface tension at those small scales is very high, and in a way that's difficult to describe without getting into some serious chemistry, this causes water droplets tend to cling to one another.

The clouds that you see way up high in the air, the wispy white ones are actually composed of ice crystals.

Rain results when the droplets in the low-level clouds become large enough through condensation to overcome the attractive effects from other droplets, and the natural upwards movement of the warm air they are in.

Answer 3

You have answered your question in the question already. Water is in the liquid form, whereas water vapor is in the gaseous form. Gases expand to fill the volume they are put in, which in this case is the earth's atmosphere. Water vapor exists in the atmosphere as relative humidity, expressed as the percent of water vapor in the atmosphere compared to the maximum amount (100%) possible at that given temperature and atmospheric pressure.

Answer 4

you know, u had asked a question and answered it by yourself. you are right clouds are water vapor so that it has low density than air and goes up, and it falls down just when it passed through a cold area where it converted to water drops or snow "heavier than air ". thanks for your question...

Answer 5

Water vapour is a gas wich makes it light enough to float

Answer 6

Its "water vapour" not water.

ever asked yourself why steam goes up and not down

Answer 7

Archimedes might have a thought on this one.

Answer 8

they just are deal with it