Why do clouds have different altitudes and appearances?
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Clouds aren’t real (lol). Clouds are simply areas within the atmosphere where the combination of temperature and humidity causes the water vapour it contains to condense into visible droplets.
Where clouds actually form depends on how much water the atmosphere contains, and the processes responsible for causing it’s temperature to change.
For example, a somewhat moist patch of air may have crossed the whole Pacific ocean without cooling enough for its water to condense. Buy when that patch of air meets a coastal mountain range in Western Canada, the land forces the air to rise. Rising air cools. At a certain altitude it will cool enough for its water to condense, forming cloud. Assuming it is of similar temperature and humidity, all the air which follows will form cloud at precisely the same altitude.
After these clouds dump some of their moisture as rain, when they descend on the other side of the mountain range, the air warms up again, but with less moisture, the clouds disappear at a higher altitude because the dryer has less water it must hold onto.
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