How many elephants are a cloud?

Clouds are something that is so familiar to us that we are almost indifferent to it. But have you ever thought how heavy the clouds are floating in the sky?

Compare the weight of two objects: cloud and elephant

Peggy LeMone - scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado - says the amount of water in a small cloud weighs about 550 tons. She said: "If you want to associate that weight in a more understandable way, you can think of . elephants."

Elephants are too light for clouds.

Suppose, an elephant weighs about 6 tons, the amount of water contained in a cumulonimbus cloud (typical white cloud) typically weighs about 100 elephants combined. From there, we have another question: " How can they float and float gently above it? What keeps them from falling to the ground?".

LeMone explained that water molecules that make up clouds are not the size of an elephant but they are much smaller and these molecules float on warm, rising air currents . Although LeMone knows this well, the truth about the amount of water floating in the sky still surprises a meteorologist like her.

Peggy says she doesn't think about how heavy a cloud is until she starts calculating it. She calculated how many elephants the amount of water in a small storm. Once again, LeMone brought amazing numbers: about 200,000 elephants.

Even if a storm of level 8 or higher is applied, the result is a truly huge number. Four million elephants! That means the amount of water contained in a storm is heavier than all the elephants on the planet. Perhaps it is on par with all the elephants that once lived on Earth.