How big are clouds? Like, how much geographical space could they cover? A town? A city?
In: Physics
Well, there’s tons of different sizes. They can range to being about the size of a house (think of those small patches that move faster than the rest), and then you have really big ones which can stretch up to 20 miles tall (someone linked one of those 15 mile tall ones) and be as wide as 25 miles, but hurricanes can be way bigger (I think they can be like 100 miles in diameter, I live nowhere near the coast so idk 100%).
I’m an airline pilot so I spend a lot of time around clouds. They come in all sizes. Some little wisps are as small as a car while larger ones can be many many miles across and 60,000 feet tall.
From a long and full life of experience here in the UK I can confidently say they go from tiny little wispy specs on the horizon to monsters that can cover the whole country. And anywhere inbetween too for good measure.
I love this question because I was just thinking about the same thing earlier since the clouds were so low & black here today. Like, we can all look up at the sun or moon at the same time but over what geographical area are people looking at the same cloud?
Some are big, some are small.
Next time you fly, pay attention to the clouds during take off, cruising and landing. You’ll see all sorts.
Not sure on volume they take up but I know they get to weigh hundreds of millions of pounds.
Look up “Earth” in Google images. You can see that clouds come in a wide variety of sizes, from tiny dots you can barely make out all the way up to medium-sized countries.
And how tall can they get? I’ve been itching to ask this forever. Some look huge, are they like mountain height? Tall building?
Fog is a cloud. From what I’ve seen on weather satellite images sometimes a fog bank can span an area larger than Texas. According to [this article, the author’s approximation](https://www.times-news.com/archives/how-far-away-and-how-big-are-clouds/article_cea79e25-4892-5383-a921-f791e3fa140f.html) puts your typical cumulus cloud at “0.25 miles from top to bottom and 0.25 miles wide.” About as wide and tall as the length of a city block. Other cloud types can range anywhere between the size of a cumulus cloud to the size of a fog bank.
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