How can rain clouds float in the sky when they are carring hundreds of millions of gallons of water.?
606380
Clouds are tiny droplets of water that have condensed on condensation nuclei such as pollen, dust, ash, & pollution in the troposphere.\n\nB/c they are very tiny and independant of each other, they tend to be suspended. This is due to various things such as updrafts, winds, etc. They are very lightweight. Only when they begin to start growing in size will gravity take over & they start to fall as rain.
133764
Well the sun comes out heats up the water and it turns into water vapor and goes through comdencation  which forms a cloud
496058
Water is heavier than air, but then so are smoke  particles,pollen, dust and all sorts of other things that float in the air.\n\nClouds float because the water droplets they contain are extremely small. If you go outside with a flashlight on a foggy night you can actually see the tiny water droplets in the cloud. Because the water droplets are so small they fall incredibly slowly. Any wind at all will keep them aloft.\n\nClouds rain when the water droplets join together and become so big and heavy that they can no longer float on the air. They then fall to the ground.
814547
did you mean how do clouds form?\n\nIf so, they form from water evaporating on the surface of the earth. As the vapour rises, it reaches cooler, higher areas of the atmosphere and the vapour begins to condense, around microscopic particles in the air. Once this process has started, other molecules will start to join in, until the vapour condenses and clumps together. When enough forms, it is no longer lighter than air, and rain will occur.
540512
In the clouds as water vapor.
1156612
Water vapour is a colourless, transparent gas - so clouds are quite clearly not made of it.\n\nClouds are indeed made of small drops of water. They stay up becaus of convection. Clouds can only be stable where there is an updraft to counter the slow drift down of the water droplets under gravity. \n\nThere are two basic types - stratiform which are stable and supported by a constant updraft and convective in which you can actually see the churning effect of convection if you look.
654217
How droplets form:\n\nRain droplets are formed from water vapor in the atmosphere that condenses onto dust particles.  Water vapor is lighter than air, but water is not.  The condensation onto the impurities in dust (nucleation) is more kinetically favorable than a sudden, rapid condensation of all the water in the air (making a splash).  This nucleation phenomena is very similar to observations you can make when you boil water (or let carbonated beverages bubble).  The bubbles will form (nucleate and grow) at tiny cracks and imperfections.  (A very smooth container will have fewer bubbles). Eventually the bubbles get big enough (buoyancy overcomes surface tension) and they rise to the surface.  The main differences between this and rain is that these gas "droplets" fall upward because of buoyancy and they have to overcome an adhesive force to start falling, whereas rain just has to fall fast enough to escape air currents.\n\nThere is another less kinetically favorable mechanism for boiling water that you can sometimes repeat in a microwave, but it is very dangerous.  If you heat water in a microwave, it is possible to get it higher than the boiling point because there hasn't been sufficient time for steam bubbles to form and grow and rise to the surface.  As soon as you touch the surface of the superheated water with say a spoon you could be providing a nucleation site and the water will suddenly boil very dangerously.  If you do this experiment, be very careful.\n\nIf rain WERE observed to fall as a sudden splash rather than as droplets, an analagous condition would be that all of the carbonation in your soda will come out in a sudden blast of carbon dioxide, making a mess and giving you flat pop instantly.  Both processes involve nucleation and growth of droplets (bubbles).\n\nHow droplets fall to the earth:\n\nAll objects heavier than the air will fall to the earth, accelerating until they reach their terminal velocity (the fastest they can go relative to the air speed because of drag).  Really small objects, like rain droplets or insects have very small terminal velocities, so they can get buffeted around without falling much.  Once a rain droplet gets big enough, it can finally fall to the ground at a reasonable speed.  It has a limit on how large it can get because the bigger it gets the faster it falls.  Some basics behind the math follow.\n\nThe terminal velocity is reached when the aerodynamic drag force exactly balances the gravitational force.  The aerodynamic drag force increases with surface area and with velocity (lets consider it to be proportional to the velocity in this example...this is true for sufficiently small objects).  The gravitational force increases with mass (or at constant density) volume.  Volume is roughly proportional to the cube of the relavant length scale of the object.  Surface area is roughly proportional to the square of the length scale of the object.\n\nThus the ratio of the drag force to the gravitional force is c*v*L^2/L^3 = c*v/L, v is the falling velocity, L is typical length scale of the object (like a meter for a person, a foot for a bowling ball, a cm for a big bug), and c is a parameter that lumps together the effects of shape, viscosity, density, and so on.\n\nSo when this ratio c*v/L = 1, the velocity must be the terminal velocity, the fastest the object can fall, v_t.  If you rearrange the equation you see that c*v_t = L.  This means that for a given object with the same physical properties and shape but differing size, the bigger object will fall faster.
913566
the clouds from the sky helps regulate the temperatures.
562505
When the clouds become so saturated that they can't hold anymore water, it rains.
56788
I can answer half of this question, I think. Clouds are water (H2O) in vapor (gaseous) form. Water floating in a classroom? Its still H2O but you'll need to get either a plumber or an HVAC technician to answer that!
470783
yes, clouds are just like fog, except they are higher and some contain moisture.  Although you can't walk on clouds, they do hold water that can fall down to earth as water or ice, that has a lot to do with how hard the wind is blowing at the same height as the cloud holding the water.  But aircraft fly though clouds all the time, so you can't walk on it, and trying to grab a cloud with your hand would be like catching smoke.
233535
i always thought it was because there was no humidity in the air...probably wrong, anyway. or maybe its because the warm climate doesnt allow the moisture to turn back into water. who knows? prob a weatherman.
213534
They stay in the sky because they are part of our atmosphere. \n\nDefinition of a cloud - 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. \n\nThey aren't forced to drop to the ground unless they become larger droplets or bigger ice particles forcing them down by gravity - which is what would be rain or a storm.
997610
They are shaped by the wind and heat.\nSee in\nhttp://allaboutweather.tripod.com/cloudclassification.htm
836414
We can not control clouds but we can diver the direction of which it passes.  By using bombs and other chemicals it is possible.  It is used where agriculture lands are dried due to lack of rains.
601596
Clouds form when the invisible water vapor in the air condenses into visible water droplets or ice crystals. This can happen in three ways.\n\n1. The air is cooled below its saturation point. This happens when the air comes in contact with a cold surface or a surface that is cooling by radiation, or the air is cooled by adiabatic expansion (rising). This can happen\n\nalong warm and cold fronts (frontal lift), \nwhere air flows up the side of a mountain and cools as it rises higher into the atmosphere (orographic lift), \nby the convection caused by the warming of a surface by insolation (diurnal heating), \nwhen warm air blows over a colder surface such as a cool body of water. \n2. Clouds can be formed when two air masses below saturation point mix. Examples are breath on a cold day, aircraft contrails, and Arctic sea smoke.\n\n3. The air stays the same temperature but absorbs more water vapor into it until it reaches saturation.\n\nThe water in a typical cloud can have a mass of up to several million tonnes. However the volume of a cloud is correspondingly high, and the net density of water vapor is actually low enough that air currents below and within the cloud are capable of keeping small droplets suspended. As well, conditions inside a cloud are not static: water droplets are constantly forming and re-evaporating. A typical cloud droplet has a radius on the order of 1 x 10-5 m and a terminal velocity of about 1-2 cm/s. This give these droplets plenty of time to re-evaporate as they fall into in the warmer air beneath the cloud.\n\nMost water droplets are formed when water vapor condenses around a condensation nucleus, a tiny particle of smoke, dust, ash, or salt. In supersaturated conditions, water droplets may act as condensation nuclei.\n\nWater droplets large enough to fall to the ground are produced in two ways. The most important is through the Bergeron Process, theorized by Tor Bergeron, in which supercooled water droplets and ice crystals in a cloud interact to produce the rapid growth of ice crystals, which precipitate from the cloud and melt as they fall. This process typically takes place in clouds with tops cooler than -15°C. The second most important process is the collision and wake capture process, occurring in clouds with warmer tops, in which the collision of rising and falling water droplets produces larger and larger droplets, which are eventually heavy enough to overcome air currents in the cloud and the updraft beneath it and fall as rain. As a droplet falls through the smaller droplets which surround it, it produces a "wake" which draws some of the smaller droplets into collisions, thus perpetuating the process. This method of raindrop production is the primary mechanism in low stratiform clouds and small cumulus clouds in trade winds and tropical regions, and produces raindrops of several millimeters diameter.\n\n \nThis wave cloud pattern formed off of the Île Amsterdam in the far southern Indian Ocean.The actual form of cloud created depends on the strength of the uplift and on air stability. In unstable conditions convection dominates, creating vertically developed clouds. Stable air produces horizontally homogeneous clouds. Frontal uplift creates various cloud forms depending on the composition of the front (ana-type or kata-type warm or cold front). Orographic uplift also creates variable cloud forms depending on air stability, although cap cloud and wave clouds are specific to orographic clouds.
1132230
Standing in any cloud you would get wet. Clouds are made up from condensation from rain water. It is water droplets that make the clouds in the first place.