What are clouds made of, and how are they made?

Answer 1

What are clouds?
Clouds are water. Either small liquid water drops or tiny pieces of ice. Meteorologists rank clouds according to their height and whether or not they are flat or puffy. The graph below is Dan's easy way to remember clouds.

Flat Puffy
Low Stratus Cumulus
Medium Alto stratus Alto cumulus
High Cirrostratus Cirrocumulus
Tall Cumulonimbus
(or Thunderstorm)

Nimbus means rain cloud.


. Clouds form when the air rises. As a blob of air rises it expands and gets colder, the colder air cannot hold as much water as warmer air. As the temperature and air pressure continue to drop, tiny water droplets group together into clumps called cloud droplets. At this point, the blob of air becomes a visible cloud. If the cloud keeps going up, the cloud droplets will clump together and form water droplets. These water droplets are too heavy to float in the air and they fall from the sky as either rain or snow.

Answer 2

Clouds are made from water droplets that are large enough to reflect light back at the viewer. Moisture at the ground evaporates, which absorbs energy from the surroundings. The water vapor is said to have latent heat. If a source of lift occurs (either from heating of the ground, because hot air rises, or a warm or cold front, an outflow boundary from an old storm, orographic lifting due to terrain features), then the moist air rises up. The temperature of the surrounding air decreases the higher up you go, but moist air cools of slower than dry air. The moist air rises until it cools off to the same temperature as the dry air around it. The cloud starts to become visible when the moist air reaches the dewpoint temperature and begins to condense into water droplets, releasing its latent heat and allowing the moist ait to rise ever higher. The faster the dry air around the cloud cools off with height, the faster the cloud will grow, and the higher the cloud will grow. Clouds that reach only a short height before stopping their upwards motion have reached a "temperature inversion", also known as a capping layer. This is a layer of warm air above the cloud that stops the cloud from getting any higher. If the capping layer is cooled down, then the clouds can eventually break through, shoot skywards and produce thunderstorms. At the top of the troposphere (the lowest layer of the atmosphere), the temperature of the surrounding air begins to rise sharply again, placing an upper limit of the height of the thunderstorm cloud (cumulonimbus). The jet stream up high takes the top part of the cloud and blows it downwind, to form the characteristic "anvil" of a thunderstorm.

The drier the air is at ground level, the higher off the ground the cloud base will be. The moister the air is at ground level, the lower the cloud base will be. When the air at ground level is already at its dewpoint temperature (common in the morning), you get fog, which is just a cloud that forms on the ground!

Answer 3

Clouds are made of water droplets. They are formed when air saturated with water vapour (a gas which you can't see) cools and releases some of the moisture as water. These are very fine droplets and can float in the air. As more moisture condenses, so some of these tiny droplets clump together (coalesce) and become too heavy to be suspended by the air, so fall as rain, snow, or hail (precipitation). Often the water was so cold in the cloud that it formed ice crystals which melted as they fell and became rain. This is why rain from a thunderstorm is often so much colder and the drops are larger. It was actually formed as hailstones which melted when they hit the warmer air and became rain in large drops.

Answer 4

A cloud is a visible aggregate of tiny water droplets and/or ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere and can exist in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some clouds are accompanied by precipitation; rain, snow, hail or sleet.

All clouds form as a consequence of rising air. Sometimes air is forced to rise over mountains. More usually, warm air, being less dense, will rise above cold air. At fronts for example, warm air masses rise over cold air masses when they converge. At much smaller scales, columns of rising warm air may be generated by daytime heat from the Sun.

When air rises, it expands, causing cooling and a drop in temperature. As the temperature falls, the humidity (or water vapour content) of air increases towards 100%. Finally, after sufficient cooling, the air becomes saturated, and water vapour begins to condense out as tiny water droplets, forming cloud.

Clouds are classified into a system that uses Latin words to describe the appearance of clouds as seen by an observer on the ground. There are four principal classes of cloud:

Answer 5

Clouds aren't made, they are born. They are sentient creatures that migrate in herds, producing rain as an act of penitence for having offended the Sun God. Some rogue clouds can be seen in bright clear skies but they are not as dangerous as people imagine. When clouds swarm, they create storms and cyclones. The worst thing you can do to a cloud is call it an amalgam of rain drops. Clouds have feelings.
It is true that lightning occurs when clouds mate but no one has actually witnessed the act of consummation. Some clouds may indeed be hermaphrodites.

Answer 6

clouds are made of water droplets and the water cycle makes the clouds. first the water is evaporated then the water and then the water is condensated or condensation and then the rain in the cloud falls which is called percipatation and then the ground soaks the water up and that is called storage. And the cycle goes over and over again. that's how clouds are made.

Answer 7

Water droplets or more accurately moisture. A cloud is made when a warm air front meets a cold air front. The difference in temperature causes moisture to condense from the air (much like water condensing on a mirror when you take a shower in a sealed room).

Look in Wikipedia for more info.

Answer 8

And so u know water is a "sticky" substance, as in it is attracted to it-self by a +ve charge, that's how the clouds form and it's not spread all over the sky.

Answer 9

Water vapour.

It rises through evapouration of water by the sun.

This condenses in the sky and then when it gets to be saturated, it has to fall as rain and snow.

Answer 10

clouds are ctually made of water vapor which condensates on particles that are suspended in the air.

good luck.