how do clouds stay up in the sky? and why do they appear white in color?

Question

since clouds have the capacity to hold so much water ( many thousands of litres) how in the world do they manage to stay up there? and why do they appear white or grey just before it rains?

Answer 1

Clouds stay up because they are being bounced around by air molecules. When the drops of water in the cloud start to fall, they are bounced back up by colliding with molecules of air. This only works for very small drops. When the drops get too big, they can't be supported any more and they fall as rain.

Clouds are white because sunlight is white. They reflect the sunlight.

Answer 2

Clouds are made from droplets of water (not water vapour, which is a colourless gas), and these are, of course, more dense than air. So why do they stay up?

The answer is convection.

Warm air currents rising from the Earth and winds keep the droplets suspended. The droplets are very, very tiny and so their terminal velocity is very very low (that is, the drag of the air on them is very large given their size). The approximate drag is given by Stoke's law, but typically in still air they would only drift very slowly down under gravity.

Clouds have to thicken before they can produce rain. This means they have to accumulate more water droplets and these droplets need to become larger (so that they overcome the uplift of convection). Larger droplets bock or scatter more light and change the appearance of the cloud.

Rain is produced when the clouds are forced to rise, as this results in the air cooling and more vapour condensing into droplets. The air can be forced to rise by two main effects. One is hitting a mountain or hill, where the wind forces the air uphill. Hence windward hillsides are rainy. The other is when a cold and warm front meet. The cold air stays low and forces the warm air to rise over it.

Answer 3

Clouds are hot air containing some dust particles and a lot of water vapor which condenses into tiny water droplets when the clouds rise (since their density is less compared to the air at ground level, they rise high enough till their density matches the surrounding air. They appear dark grey before it rains because of the condensed water drops (very small) held in them. When the drops become big enough, it starts falling down as rain.

Answer 4

break it down think about fog.....which is a cloud basically before it rains...the vapor begins to condence and only then does it begin to get heavy....water as a vapor is lighter and and usually warmer than air so it raises

they only become visable when some molecules convert from gas back to very tiny bits of water...so small individually that they float despite they now weight more...like cigar smoke...so tiny any higher temperature or updraft will keep them suspended, they are white because that's just how it happens to reflect the light, all the wavelengthes bounce off

Answer 5

Coz the clouds contain water vapour which is gaseous form of water so gas being lighter rises up in the sky so clouds stay up only....and it appears grey or white as the gasoues water vapour is converted in the water drop lets which makes to appear so...!

Answer 6

Because clouds are composed of light, tiny droplets Clouds are white because the rain and sleet inside of the clouds scatters all sunlight equally creating white light.

Answer 7

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