As the title asks, what is the average mass of each kind of cloud? Ignoring things like overcast days, and only considering clouds large enough to identify. Or maybe rather than “average” it’d be better to say “what is the mass of an archiypical cloud of each type?” Eg an archiypical cumulus, cirrus, cumulonimbus, etc.
I think you’d be better served to ask about the average volume of a cloud (if that makes sense, given how diverse they come). Because the mass is pretty much exactly volume multiplied with density. And the average density of clouds is pretty much exactly that of the surrounding air at the given altitude (because otherwise the cloud would not float, but either rise up or sink down). And the density of air at any given altitude is given by the Barometric formula. If you take a kubik kilometer of cloud (honestly, I have no idea how big clouds are), it would have a mass of approximately 364 thousand tons at 11 km above sea level, 88 thousand tons at 20 kilometers above sea level, 860 tons at 51 km above sea level and ca. 64 tons at 71km above sea level. But “regular” clouds only go up to ca. 20km, and 95% of the clouds you see are probably below 8km. Unfortunately the quoted wikipedia page has no entry for the barometric pressure at that altitude and I am too lazy to try and calculate it right now ;)
At sea level air is about 1.25 kg/m³, so for one cubic kilometer cloud that is :
1 250 000 tons.
I put your result into table
to show a problem at 51 km and above… since density decreases monotically with altitude.Clouds can be easily 10 cubic km.
I’m mostly interested in how much water is in a cloud. The mass of air is also interesting, but it isn’t what I was originally thinking when I asked
Should’ve started with that, that’s a very different question :)
The question is a work in progress 😉 You don’t always know what you really want to ask until you start a discussion.
Fair enough, that’s a good take on asking questions / learning :)