How are clouds formed?
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Clouds are formed when water vapour in the air is cooled and condenses as part of the water cycle. Clouds consist of billions of tiny water droplets (and even ice crystals) floating in the sky and appear in a variety of shapes and sizes depending on how and where they formed.
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Losing yourself in the skies and clouds are natures gift to us. I've seen objects, faces and "calming" designs. Cloud formations are majestic, serene, power and forces you to daydream and go to places only in your heart and mind. Clouds bring out the best in ones mind and with its changing of texture and color warn us of danger. A great "present" given to all by Mother nature.Give thanks, enjoy it and protect it.
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Fog is made when water vapor condenses, the same as clouds.\n\nTechnically they are the same thing. Fog is obviously at lower altitudes.\n\nClouds form when warm moist air rises, cools (reaches dew point), & condenses on small particulates (aerosols) in the atmosphere.\n\nFog can form in many different ways. There are about 5 or 6 that I know of...\n\nRadiation: forms on cool clear nights\nSteam fog:forms over water when the water is still warm but the air is cool (think fall nights)\nAdvection: moist air flowing over cool water or land (think San Francisco)\nvalley fog\nprecipitation fog\n\nknow less about the last 3.\n\n:)
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When sun shines on water, it warms it up and since heat is lighter, the water kinda floats up into the air. That's called evaporating. Then when it's high in the sky, many little water droplets come together and from clouds. When there's too many water droplets, the cloud becomes to watery and it rains. Then it starts all over again.
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The shape is completely random, based on how air currents (wind and updrafts) are moving around and inside the cloud. You get so many cloud shapes over time that a few random patterns are bound to resemble something else we're familiar with, such as a heart or a dog.
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Snow is precipitation in the form of crystalline water ice, consisting of a multitude of snowflakes. Since it is composed of small rough particles it is a granular material. It has an open and therefore soft structure, unless packed by external pressure.\n\nSnow is commonly formed when water vapor undergoes deposition high in the atmosphere at a temperature of less than 0°C, and then falls to the ground. It can also be produced by hoar frost which falls from the surface on which it is formed, or falling particles of ice fog formed when the humidity in surface air freezes at very low temperatures. Snow is less dense than rain, which means the same amount of moisture will produce a greater volume of snow than it will rain. One rule of thumb is that the water in eight units of snow is equivalent to one unit of rain. See Snow density.\n\nYou could get more informatino from the link below...
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It gets cooler as you go higher in the atmosphere. The water vapour in the air condenses on the dust particles forming tiny water droplets. These droplet float in the air. Such clusters of droplets is what we call clouds.
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Heat from the sun that warms water in the Oceans, rivers,and lakes. The water evaporates goes up inot the clouds, evaporated watre dropplets cling to dust particles in the atmoshpere, These become clouds, and as soon as enough water is clinging to one drop it beginn, rivers to rain, as if the clouds are to heavy to hold anymore. If it is cold then it will snow. This falls to the ground and (if snow melts) runs into the ocean rivers and lakes. REpeat Process with heat from the sun. ^^
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The sky is beautiful, but clouds are just water vapors. How does a tree grow? Photosynthesis. Knowing how something occurs does make it less beautiful does it?
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Sleet is formed by snow (single ice crystals) being formed in cold clouds and then falling through warmer air so that they begin to partially melt, falling as wet snow - sleet.\n\nHailstones form by water droplets freezing very quickly in a cloud so that they form a small blob or nucleus rather than the larger crystal formed by a slow freezing snow flake crystal. The nucleus continues to fall through the cloud until it meets a strong upcurrent of warmer damper air coming up from the ground.  This blows the ice droplet up into the colder part of the cloud.  the warm air surrounding the nucleus cools and the water in it condenses out and freezes onto the surface of the existing ice droplet making it larger and heavier.  This is cycle isrepeated until the updraught is not strong enough to keep the hailstone airborne and it (and the millions of others with it) drop to the ground.\n\nThe stronger the updraught the larger the final hailstone.\n\nIf you collect some hailstones after they have dropped and use a sharp knife to cleanly cut one in half, you might be able to see the individuals layers of ice within the hailstone through a magnifying glass or microscope.\n\nHailstones can become very very big - have alook at the guiness book of records - but I believe that you Americans hold the record for a hailstone that fell in Kansas, USA, and was measured at 43.18cm (17 in) long - unfortunately no idea of the weight.
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The clouds form when air near the earth's surface is warmed, causing it to rise since warm air rises. Think of a marshmallow in a microwave; as the microwave heats the marshmallow it begins to expand. This is similar to most things, like air. When air heats up it expands and this expanding air has to go somewhere because it is taking up more space, just as the marshmallow does, so this expanding warm air rises. Well, as the air rises it is losing its heat and cooling. When things cool, they condense; think of the marshmallow again as it cools when you take it out of the microwave (it shrinks, or condenses). In a general sense, to give you a brief idea of how clouds form, when condensation occurs, clouds take shape; you must keep in mind, however, that there is much more involved in cloud formation, but this was just to get you thinking and give a place for the lightning to happen.\n\nThe tendency of charges within a cloud is to have positive charges gather toward the upper portion and negative charges in the bottom of the cloud. \nWhen the difference between these charges is great enough to overcome the air's natural insulation, which keeps these charges from mixing, a lightning flash can take place. This charge difference builds up to millions of volts before the stoke of lightning takes place. The lightning bolt actually happens because nature tries to maintain equilibrium, a state of balance between all things. This is why the lightning that you see is a discharge of energy in the form of electricity. \n\nyea..thats the scientific answer to why it strikes...hope u can undertand it....i got it in skool\n\nas for how far away it is\n\ni learned that it comes from the "eye" of the storm or the center, && after the lightning flashes, count mississippi & the number of seconds equals a rought amount of miles you are away from the "eye" of the storm\n\nhope that helps
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I did a Yahoo Search for:\nflat cloud bottom\nhttp://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=utf-8&fr=slv1-&p=flat%20cloud%20bottom\n\nand I found this page which is from a sight call "Ask A Scientist" where they answer this very question:\nhttp://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/wea00/wea00041.htm\n\nThe answers aren't great, but it seems to do with level at which water vapor begins to condense into cloud forming water droplets.  It depends on the temperature or air pressure.  The reason the bottoms of some clouds look flat is that these conditions are pretty uniform over a large area.  As you go higher up, temperature and pressure decrease and the transition point is a fairly consistent altitude for that moment in time.\n\nFor more information on clouds and cloud types:\nhttp://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/cld/cldtyp/home.rxml
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There are a couple of reasons that work together to explain this situation. The first one has to do with how raindrops form. \n\nNow, it may seem silly to make such an obvious statement as, "Rain always falls from clouds." But once it has been said, we can then ask, "What is going on inside those clouds?" And that question leads us to plenty of relevant information! \n\nDo you remember the last time your local weather was described as being "hot and humid"? Do you remember what it FELT like? Do you also remember what the air LOOKED like? The reason I am asking these questions is because it is important to know that ordinary water is commonly found in one of three forms: solid, liquid, or gas. The liquid form is what we call "water", while the solid form we call "ice", and the gas form we call "water vapor". Water vapor is colorless, odorless, and invisible. But you sure can FEEL it on a hot and humid day! \n\nNext, do you remember the last time you encountered some fog? Think about what IT looked like. If you looked real close, you would have seen zillions of tiny tiny droplets of water floating in the air. And, if you remember the last time you saw some steam, you might think that it looked just like fog (except it was hotter). Steam is NOT pure water vapor! \n\nWell, it happens that the description, "zillions of tiny tiny droplets of water floating in the air", applies to every fog, to every mist, to every burst of steam -- and to every cloud in the sky. If you sit back and simply watch the clouds for a while, you will see that some clouds grow, some shrink, and some do nothing but move across the sky. What is happening to the growing or shrinking clouds? When a cloud grows, water vapor in the air gradually "condenses" to form lots more tiny tiny droplets. When a cloud shrinks, many droplets are completely "evaporating" to become invisible water vapor. \n\nAs the winds move air across the sky, carrying clouds along, fragments of wind known as "eddys" can do strange things to the shapes of clouds. A common game is to study a cloud's shape and guess what it looks like. Also, winds from different directions can collide with each other, which often has great effects upon clouds. It depends on how cold or warm the colliding winds are, and how much water each wind carries (only the differences matter, not whether the water is in the form of vapor or tiny drops). \n\nFor rain to happen, the weather conditions inside the clouds, and surrounding them, has to cause the droplets to grow. Some droplets will grow by colliding and combining with each other -- just what you Asked about. Some droplets will grow by acquiring more and more water vapor from the air. Some will do both. But the important thing to remember now is that MOST of the droplets in the clouds grow at the same time! \n\nBUT, the droplets do not all grow at the same rate; some grow faster than others. As soon as ANY get big enough, they start to fall out of the cloud. Water is heavier than air, after all. Depending on the wind conditions, those first raindrops might be blown back up into the cloud, where they can grow some more. Eventually, however, they get too big to stay up in the air, so they fall all the way to the ground. And the slower-growing droplets will fall after them, and the slower-growing-yet droplets will fall after THEM, and so on. This is the essence of the raining process. \n\nAs I said at the start, there are a couple of reasons why the raindrops don't combine to make a single stream. The first reason is simply that raindrops start falling just as soon as they are too heavy to stay in the air. The second reason is that they are all falling together DOWNWARDS, not sideways. If the wind blows them sideways, they all move TOGETHER sideways. That isn't good enough to cause them to meet each other, while falling, so they could combine to form a si
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A cloud is a visible body of very fine water droplets or ice particles suspended in the atmosphere at altitudes ranging up to several miles above sea level.
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A cloud forms when moisture-laden warm air rises in a column expanding and cooling with higher elevation until cool enough to condense moisture and produce a visible cloud.  The cloud is not held together but forms over the rising thermals.  When a plane flies through a cloud the ride is bumpy as it hits the various thermals feeding the cloud.  You can ride in a sailplane at Elmira, NY which will glide in a circle and actually rise without power under a forming cloud.
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droplets of water that condense on what are called condensation nuclei...which are small particles of matter that are suspended in the atmosphere (sand, sea salt, dirt etc)\n\nwhen the air temperature and dewpoint (the temperature the air needs to be to be "saturated") meet, the air condenses into a liquid form, which then attaches itself to the condensation nuclei....which in turn..gives you your cloud.
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Clouds are located in the troposphere.\nIn the colder regions the different clouds form about 6000 feet lower.\nHIGH CLOUDS\n16,500 feet and up\nIn height order (probably)\nCirrus (Ci) \nCirrus uncinus \nCirrus Kelvin-Helmholtz colombia \nCirrostratus (Cs) \nCirrocumulus (Cc) \nPileus \nContrail\n\n6,500 and 16,500 feet\nMIDDLE CLOUDS\nIn height order (probably)\nAltostratus (As) \nAltostratus undulatus \nAltocumulus (Ac) \nAltocumulus undulatus \nAltocumulus mackerel sky \nAltocumulus castellanus \nAltocumulus lenticularis\n\nLOW CLOUDS\n6,500 feet and lower\nIn Height Order (Probably)\nStratus (St) \nNimbostratus (Ns) \nCumulus humilis (Cu) \nCumulus mediocris (Cu) \nStratocumulus (Sc)\n~~~Fog is considered a cloud that forms above sea level.\n\nVERTICAL CLOUDS\n(can form at any height)\nCumulonimbus (associated with heavy precipitation and thunderstorms) (Cb) \nCumulonimbus incus \nCumulonimbus calvus \nCumulonimbus with mammatus \nCumulus congestus \nPyrocumulus