Scuba Diving club,
Southern California
Elephants in
the Sky
Using the Largest Living Land Mammal to Calculate Cloud
Mass
By Robert Krulwich
Sept.
3— 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."
Floating Masses
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.
Outweighing Elephant Populations
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.
|
Type
of Cloud |
Gallons |
Tons
of water |
Elephants |
Typical
home pool |
|
Light
cloud |
137,500 |
550 |
100 |
6.75 |
|
Puffy
cumulus cloud |
275,000,000 |
1,100,000 |
200,000 |
13,750 |
|
Hurricane |
55,000,000,000 |
220,000,000 |
40,000,000 |
2,750,000 |
|
In
other words a normal hurricane will have enough water to fill 46% of Lake
Erie. |
||||
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.
And that is a lot of water.
— ABC News' Justine Schiro and Alex Travelli contributed to this report.
(Home) (Boat Dives) (Buddy List) (Campouts) (Diving Links) (Dive Spots & Dive Boats) (Diving Time Line) (Email) (Meetings) (Membership) (Recipes) (Safety & Education) (News Letters AKA Snorkel Talk) (Non Sequitur) (Updates)
Posted September 7, 2003