Thursday 12 March 2015

Day 131 - Complex Clouds part 4

Hi all today's Day 131 and I am carrying on with my short-ish series called Complex Clouds. But before I start the facts I just want to say that this is (with the exception of my 12 days of nature series) one of the longest series I have done.

Anyway, here are the facts:
These clouds in the Cairngorms were probably Nimbus
clouds as it was pretty rainy when I was there
- still very beautiful though.

  • There is one main type of cloud that I haven't covered and that is the Nimbus Cloud. They can look a lot like Stratus Clouds but are different...
  • ...Nimbus Clouds are rain bearing meaning they have so many water molecules in them that some of them merge to become rain drops.
  • Over the last couple of posts I haven't really mentioned how they are formed. I have mentioned the water cycle in Cloud part 2 and that's basically how rain falls, so here's how clouds are formed:
  • Clouds can be created in just a couple of minutes, to up to a few hours. Water vapour rises and cools, some of the vapour condenses into tiny dust particles. When millions of these come together, they create a cloud.
  • The dust particle in these clouds are only 0.02 millimetres in diameter which is only five times smaller than the average thickness of a sheet of paper. Imagine how many of these you'd need to make one of those huge, Stratus clouds you can sometimes find.
  • Two bad things about clouds are tornadoes and hurricanes. These disasters are created when warm air flows to a 'space' where there isn't as much warm air. This event sucks in more warm air which then rises creating a continuous up-flow.
  • The air that surrounds the low pressure zone flows in a spiral, the clouds get sucked in and start spiralling around in a continuous circle. All of this gets repeated and the hurricane/tornado gets stronger and stronger.
  • As I have said in a previous cloud post, clouds can be on other planets too so this means that there could be hurricanes on other planets, Turns out, there is! Here is a link to a National Geographic site that explains about a hurricane found in the North Pole of Saturn. Click here.
Here are some links to some more information:



Hope you enjoyed,

Z.

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