Ever since I was researching albedo, I’ve felt the importance of clouds in reflecting sunlight exquisitely, but when I add that they also cause rain and circulate water over a wide area, I think they’re amazing. I’ve heard that theoretically, clouds form at a certain altitude, but I find it strange that they cover the sky like a garment, without wrapping the ground in a mist that blocks vision.
It is a circulation system in which aerosols such as dust and tiny particles on the ground act as nuclei, and as they ride updrafts, the temperature drops, small ice crystals form, and the aerosols return to the ground along with rain or snow. This circulation is thought to prevent particles from escaping from the Earth, and also to return things born from the earth back to the earth. Clouds are amazing.
It seems that some organisms create clouds by releasing aerosols into the air, and the world appears to be connected from the surface of the earth to the sky, with ice nucleating bacteria, mushroom spores, ammonia in animal feces, and terpenes in plants.
We imagine clouds as fluffy, but they contain enough moisture to bring about heavy rain, and 1 km³ of cloud weighs up to 500 tons. Sometimes I wonder where in a cloud there is so much water, but they look large even from a distance, so their volume must be huge. The water droplets in a cloud are one millionth the size of a raindrop, and their tiny size is apparently the reason they can continue to float in the sky.
https://nazology.kusuguru.co.jp/archives/119651
Clouds take on various shapes, but among them, cumulonimbus clouds, which are clouds accompanied by lightning, are said to be special. Cumulonimbus clouds develop rapidly and are said to be accompanied by drastic changes in the weather, but each cumulonimbus cloud has a lifespan of about 30 minutes to an hour. Cumulonimbus clouds are usually associated with summer, but they also appear in winter on the Sea of Japan side, and are said to be taller in summer and have a stronger bolt of lightning in winter.
https://www.data.jma.go.jp/cpd/j_climate/hokuriku/column03.html
Also, because cumulonimbus clouds are accompanied by lightning, there is a theory that they are a kind of power generation system. If you think of cumulonimbus clouds as power generation devices and the space between the ground and the ionosphere as a giant capacitor, you can think of the Earth as a current circuit that extends to the magnetosphere and ionosphere. This is called the global circuit, and it seems to be a field of research that still has a lot we don’t understand. I guess the whole Earth is connected electrically as well.
https://jglobal.jst.go.jp/detail?JGLOBAL_ID=201402293062693818
Cumulonimbus clouds sometimes become super-giant cumulonimbus clouds called supercells, which reach more than 100km in horizontal distance, usually about 10km, and reach more than 15,000m in altitude, usually about 3,000m, into the stratosphere, lasting for more than a few hours and causing storms and tornadoes. In some cases, the vibration energy reaches the ionosphere at an altitude of 300km. That’s how much energy gathers in the clouds.
https://www.nict.go.jp/press/2013/11/01-1.html
I think that the Earth sometimes experiences extreme phenomena to keep the whole world in balance, but the energy of cumulonimbus clouds is amazing. Clouds change their shape into various forms, sometimes acting as parasols to protect us from the sun, clothes to absorb infrared rays and keep us warm, generators, pumps to suck up water, sprinklers to disperse water, and the number of roles they play is amazing. Clouds are amazing. The Earth’s system is amazing.
