If water is clear, why do rain clouds get really dark?
In: Planetary Science
Imagine you have a big bag of candy floss, when you look through a small piece of it the light can pass through easily, so it looks light and fluffy. Now, imagine squeezing a lot of candy floss together into a thick ball. It becomes a lot harder for the light to pass through, so it looks darker.
Rain clouds are like that. When a cloud is thin, sunlight can pass through it easily so it looks white. But when a cloud gets very thick and full of water droplets, the light has a harder time getting through, making the cloud look dark.
So dark cloud means they are full of water and might rain soon!
Light travelling through different mediums (such as from air to water) causes the light to refract (aka bend). With lots of little droplets in the sky, light bounces all around, usually creating the white clouds we see in the sky. Storm clouds are huge, stretching high into the upper atmosphere. They are large enough that very few photons entering the top of the cloud coming from the sun make bounce their way through the cloud to exit the bottom, thus making the cloud appear darker than non-storm clouds.
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