How are clouds formed?

Answer 1

(m)

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

A cloud is formed when water vapor condenses back into its liquid state. This can happen in many ways but the basic method is when a moist air mass gets lifted to a certain altituted. That altitude, for a short period of time, is associated with a temp. called the dew point. This is the temp at which the water vapor in the air condenses. Since the temp usually decreases as your altitude increases, the moist air mass must get lifted to the altitude where the temp is low enough for the water vapor to condense. This can happen when air is forced up a mountain, or if a moist air mass passes over some hot land. The same thing happens when you take a shower. You are putting a bunch of hot moisture laden air into the bathroom. But the objects in the bathroom like the mirror are still kinda cold compared to the temp of the air. Because of this, the little layer of air right next to the mirror's surface gets cooled down enough that the moisture comes out in condensation. Just like when air is forced upward and clouds are formed. Another thing to note is that condensation doesn't happen unless there is something for the water droplets for form on. In the bathroom it's anything that is cool enough. In the case of the atmostphere though, it can be things like super small dust particles, debris, and airborne particulates.

Answer 3

Clouds form mainly due to the vertical motion of air.When a humid air rises it gets cooled and once it reaches the dewpoint temperature, condensation starts.The condesation takes place in the presence of condensation nuclei.The atmosphere usually has sufficient condensation nuclei for cloud droplets to form.During condensation process, a hygroscopic nucleus which is capable of absorbing the water vapour, grows up,overcomes the curvature effect and remains in suspension as a droplet .Many such droplets together form a cloud.

Answer 4

Clouds form when the invisible water vapour in the air condenses into visible water droplets or ice crystals. This can happen in three ways:

1. The air is cooled below its saturation point. This happens when the air comes in contact with a cold surface or a surface that is cooling by radiation, or the air is cooled by adiabatic expansion (rising).

This can happen:
-along warm and cold fronts (frontal lift)
-where air flows up the side of a mountain and cools as it rises higher into the atmosphere (orographic lift)
by the convection caused by the warming of a surface by insolation (diurnal heating)
-when warm air blows over a colder surface such as a cool body of water.

2. Clouds can be formed when two air masses below saturation point mix. Examples are, our breath on a cold day, aircraft contrails and Arctic sea smoke.

3. The air stays the same temperature but absorbs more water vapor into it until it reaches saturation point.

The water in a typical cloud can have a mass of up to several million tonnes. However, the volume of a cloud is correspondingly high, and the net density of the relatively warm air holding the droplets is low enough that air currents below and within the cloud are capable of keeping it suspended. As well, conditions inside a cloud are not static: water droplets are constantly forming and re-evaporating. A typical cloud droplet has a radius on the order of 1 x 10-5 m and a terminal velocity of about 1-2 cm/s. This gives these droplets plenty of time to re-evaporate as they fall into the warmer air beneath the cloud.

Cumulonimbus cloudMost water droplets are formed when water vapor condenses around a condensation nucleus, a tiny particle of smoke, dust, ash, or salt. In supersaturated conditions, water droplets may act as condensation nuclei.

The growth of water droplets around these nuclei in supersaturated conditions is given by the Mason equation.

Water droplets large enough to fall to the ground are produced in two ways. The most important means is through the Bergeron Process, theorized by Tor Bergeron, in which supercooled water droplets and ice crystals in a cloud interact to produce the rapid growth of ice crystals; these crystals precipitate from the cloud and melt as they fall. This process typically takes place in clouds with tops cooler than -15°C. The second most important process is the collision and wake capture process, occurring in clouds with warmer tops, in which the collision of rising and falling water droplets produces larger and larger droplets, which are eventually heavy enough to overcome air currents in the cloud and the updraft beneath it and fall as rain. As a droplet falls through the smaller droplets which surround it, it produces a "wake" which draws some of the smaller droplets into collisions, perpetuating the process. This method of raindrop production is the primary mechanism in low stratiform clouds and small cumulus clouds in trade winds and tropical regions and produces raindrops of several millimeters diameter.

This wave cloud pattern formed off of the Île Amsterdam in the far southern Indian OceanThe actual form of cloud created depends on the strength of the uplift and on air stability. In unstable conditions convection dominates, creating vertically developed clouds. Stable air produces horizontally homogeneous clouds. Frontal uplift creates various cloud forms depending on the composition of the front (ana-type or kata-type warm or cold front). Orographic uplift also creates variable cloud forms depending on air stability, although cap cloud and wave clouds are specific to orographic clouds.

"Hot Ice" and "Ice Memory" in cloud formation-

In addition to being the colloquial term sometimes used to describe dry ice, hot ice is the name given to a surprising phenomenon in which water can be turned into ice at room temperature by supplying an electric field of the order of 1 million volts per meter. (Choi 2005). The effect of such electric fields has been suggested as an explanation of cloud formation. This theory, however, is highly controversial and is not, by any means, widely accepted as being the actual mechanism of cloud formation. The first time cloud ice forms around a clay particle, it requires a temperature of -10°C, but subsequent freezing around the same clay particle requires a temperature of just -5°C, suggesting some kind of "ice memory"..

Answer 5

when the breeze blow them together they form