If Your Head Is In the Clouds At Least It Won't Get Wet

When you're flying, you see more of the world. You see the shimmer of lakes and oceans only available at high altitude. You pass serenely through giant fluffy clouds. If you get high enough, you can see a blanket of those clouds shadowing vast stretches of the Earth's surface. For all you get to see at this scale, you do miss one thing about clouds: the billion pounds of water they carry.

Clouds, no matter the species, can be absolutely massive. A typical thunderstorm can be miles high and miles wide - enough space for what looks like a dense fog to contain a biblical amount of water. An average thunderstorm can contain 2.3 billion pounds of water. It would take a full six minutes for an equal amount of water to go over Niagara Falls.

If you were to stroll a few meters through an average cloud, walking on could nine, as it were; you would only encounter a few grams of water. It would be a pleasant misting, something akin to those sprayers that keep the patrons of Six Flags cool on hot days. Even walking through a storm cloud would hardly drench you (though it would depend on where you walk). For a comparison, each of your feet can produce up to a pint of sweat a day. You could amble through 470 cubic meters of cloud - six and a half times the volume of a freight container - before you encountered the same amount of liquid.

A cloud floats because of how spread out its mass is. It's so spread out that wind currents overcome the force of gravity on the microscopic droplets. Only when enough of these droplets knock into each other do they begin to throw their weight around. That's when we get out our umbrellas.

Further Reading:

Art Installation Lets You Walk Among the Clouds

Why do clouds float when they have tons of water in them?