What Are Clouds Made Of?
Clouds are collections of water droplets or tiny crystals of ice floating in the air high above ground level. They form when warm air containing moisture moves up into the sky and begins to cool. Clouds are not all alike. Some are fluffy and white, while others form gray or black coverings over the earth. Clouds float at differe
The air can only sustain a certain amount of water in gaseous form. The warmer the air, the more it can contain. As air cools down, falling under what is known as the dew point temperature, it must condense as water droplets. As a reference, at 15 C (the average temperature on earth) a cubic meter of air can’t contain more than 13 grams of water. The clouds are made of water droplets, or ice crystals, or both. Very high clouds like the Cirrus, are made entirely of ice crystals. But under that, it can be both water and ice. The reason is: In order to go from gas to liquid, or liquid to solid, water needs to give away energy in form of heat and that requires a mass of just anything to dissipate the energy. Because of that, tiny water droplets can be under-cooled far beyond freezing point. It is only when it touches something like a corn of dust, smoke particles or … the leaves of a tree, that it freezes. That’s the reason you can sometimes see frost rim early in the morning.
