Eli5 How do lenticular clouds stay in one spot?
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They happen when air is moving over a mountain range and gets pushed up by the mountains to the point where water condenses out and forms the cloud. On the lee side of the mountain, the air descends and warms until the water goes back into the vapor phase. So the air in moving, but the region where you can see the condensed water stays in roughly the same spot over the mountain.
The cloud stays in one spot; the air doesn’t.
The particular molecules of air (nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, etc) that compose “a cloud” are not the same all the time. A cloud is just what happens when air passes through a region where the local conditions (temperature, pressure, etc) are right for water droplets to condense from the water vapor in the air. Yes, when you see a cloud you’re actually seeing liquid water.
Some droplets are always falling down or blowing off one side of the cloud, but others are forming in their place. The “edge” of the cloud is where the temperature becomes too high or low, or the pressure becomes too high or low, or whatever.
So, a cloud is really just a pattern where the conditions in the atmosphere become visible. For lenticular clouds, this happens when the air is moving over a mountain top. Since the mountain isn’t moving, the pattern stays right over top of it. Air blows through, but the pattern stays the same.
A similar effect is the way that waves move across the ocean, even though the water molecules all stay in the same place and just bob up and down. The wave is a pattern that persists, even though it’s never the same water that’s part of it.
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