Why are clounds not effected by gravity?

Answer 1

Everything is affected by gravity.

Clouds are made of water droplets and ice crystals. Together, these droplets and crystals weigh many tons. So if the typical cloud actually weighs as much as an elephant, why doesn't it plummet to the ground?

Because unlike an elephant, a cloud's weight is spread out over a very large area. Plus, the cloud's droplets and crystals are very small--about one micron.. A cloud's individual particles are so small that warm air rising from the earth's surface is able to keep them floating in the air. It's similar to how dust motes swirl in a shaft of sunlight. Although the bits of dust are affected by gravity, even the gentlest air currents are enough to keep them dancing around in the air.

But clouds don't stay up in the air forever, of course. When the warm air keeping clouds afloat cools, its water vapor condenses and adds to the cloud's droplets. At a certain point the droplets become heavy enough to overwhelm the force of the rising air, and all that water falls to the ground.

Answer 2

Good question.

Clouds are effected by gravity. Clouds are air with lots of humidity, or water, in them. All the air around us has water in it. We define the amount of water with the term humidity.

The amount of humidity the air can hold before the water is "squeezed" out varies with temperature. Higher termperatures can hold more water before the water turns to dew. The temperature at which the water turns to dew is called the dew point.

As you increase altitude the air pressure drops which in turns causes the temperature to drop. At some point, the air temperature might drop below the dew point of the air.

You can think of the air in the sky as having different cells each with their own humidity level. Some cells have lots of water in the air and others are a little drier. When those high humidity cells are in temperatures below the "dew point" then a cloud forms.

All the while gravity is pulling the air (with water in it) down. However, the pressure being created by the air at the bottom of the atmosphere holds the air on top, along with the clouds, up.

Answer 3

Clouds are affected by gravity. The interplay of pressure and temperature conditions mean that the water vapour can seem to be floating, but the reality is that they are being acted on by upward forces from wind, the pressure is lower so they can accumulate. When it rains, it is because of too high a density of water in the air so it comes together and forms drops, which cannot be supported by the atmospheric conditions. Then we see that water (clouds) are affected by gravity.

Answer 4

Clouds are effected by gravity. While they are light and white they remain up something like a balloon. Put water into the balloon and it will fall. When the cloud has gathered enough moisture it become heavy and falls as rain. This just my way of explaining it, I hope it helps.

Answer 5

Clouds understand that gravity, like all things, is a choice.

Choose to believe in gravity. Choose to believe in solidity. Whatever.

Once we can break our mental chains, we can walk on the 5th dimension and soar with the clouds.

Answer 6

Clouds are affected by gravity. Otherwise they'd just fly off into space!

Answer 7

Well, of course they are. The whole atmosphere is held by the earth's gravity. Otherwise it would float off into space.

Answer 8

this is because they are too light 2 be pulled by gravity!

Answer 9

They are.

Water evaporates and rises with warm air and then when it is high enough it will cool down enough to form teeny tiny droplets which are still in the warm air and become clouds up there. Then when the droplets get bigger they fall as rain.

Answer 10

Clouds are affected by gravity.
Gravity has an effect on clouds.

Clouds are composed primarily of small water droplets and, if it's cold enough, ice crystals. The vast majority of clouds you see contain droplets and/or crystals that are too small to have any appreciable fall velocity. So the particles continue to float with the surrounding air. For an analogy closer to the ground, think of tiny dust particles that, when viewed against a shaft of sunlight, appear to float in the air.
Indeed, the distance from the center of a typical water droplet to its edge--its radius--ranges from a few microns (thousandths of a millimeter) to a few tens of microns (ice crystals are often a bit larger). And the speed with which any object falls is related to its mass and surface area--which is why a feather falls more slowly than a pebble of the same weight. For particles that are roughly spherical, mass is proportional to the radius cubed (r^3); the downward-facing surface area of such a particle is proportional to the radius squared (r^2). Thus, as a tiny water droplet grows, its mass becomes more important than its shape and the droplet falls faster. Even a large droplet having a radius of 100 microns has a fall velocity of only about 27 centimeters per second (cm/s). And because ice crystals have more irregular shapes, their fall velocities are relatively smaller.


Upward vertical motions, or updrafts, in the atmosphere also contribute to the floating appearance of clouds by offsetting the small fall velocities of their constituent particles. Clouds generally form, survive and grow in air that is moving upward. Rising air expands as the pressure on it decreases, and that expansion into thinner, high-altitude air causes cooling. Enough cooling eventually makes water vapor condense, which contributes to the survival and growth of the clouds. Stratiform clouds (those producing steady rain) typically form in an environment with widespread but weak upward motion (say, a few cm/s); convective clouds (those causing showers and thunderstorms) are associated with updrafts that exceed a few meters per second. In both cases, though, the atmospheric ascent is sufficient to negate the small fall velocities of cloud particles.
Another way to illustrate the relative lightness of clouds is to compare the total mass of a cloud to the mass of the air in which it resides. Consider a hypothetical but typical small cloud at an altitude of 10,000 feet, comprising one cubic kilometer and having a liquid water content of 1.0 gram per cubic meter. The total mass of the cloud particles is about 1 million kilograms, which is roughly equivalent to the weight of 500 automobiles. But the total mass of the air in that same cubic kilometer is about 1 billion kilograms--1,000 times heavier than the liquid!

So, 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. Thus, from our vantage on the ground, clouds seem to float in the sky.