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| A fluffy cumulous cloud weighs the equivalent
of approximately 200,000 elephants, a meteorologist calculates. |
Ever wonder how much a cloud weighs? What about a hurricane?
A meteorologist has done some estimates and the results might
surprise you.
Let's start with a very simple white puffy cloud - a cumulus
cloud. How much does the water in a cumulus cloud weigh? Peggy
LeMone, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric
Research in Boulder, Colorado, did the numbers.
"The water in the little cloud weighs about 550 tons,"
she calculates. "Or if you want to convert it to something
that might be a little more meaningful … think of elephants."
Assume an elephant weighs about six tons, she says, that would
mean that water inside a typical cumulous cloud would weigh about
one hundred elephants.
The thought of a hundred elephants-worth of water suspended in
the sky begs another question - what keeps it up there?
"First of all, the water isn't in elephant sized particles,
it's in tiny tiny tiny particles," explains LeMone.
And those particles float on the warmer air that's rising below.
But still, the concept of so much water floating in the sky was
surprising even to a meteorologist like LeMone.
"I had no idea how much a cloud would weigh, actually, when
I started the calculations," she says.
So how many elephant units of water are inside a big storm cloud
… 10 times bigger all the way around than the "puffy"
cumulus cloud? Again, LeMone did the numbers: About 200,000 elephants.
Now, ratchet up the calculations for a hurricane about the size
of Missouri and the figures get really massive.
"What we're doing is weighing the water in one cubic meter
theoretically pulled from a cloud and then multiplying by the
number of meters in a whole hurricane," she explains.
The result? Forty million elephants. That means the water in
one hurricane weighs more than all the elephants on the planet.
Perhaps even more than all the elephants that have ever lived
on the planet.
（Agencies）
Updated: 2003-09-08 01:00