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The purpose they serve is they facilitate weather such as rain and snow. They reflect light and can hold heat in from a warm winter day. Certain cloud types can indicate future weather such as severe weather ie. cumulonimbus formations. Clouds have become an important focus in the study of global warming or cooling, including how the increase or decrease in cloud cover can effect the amount of radiation reflected from the earth back into space. Clouds form when the invisible water vapor in the air condenses into visible water droplets or ice crystals. This can happen in three ways: * The air is cooled below its saturation point. This happens when the air comes in contact with a cold surface or a surface that is cooling by radiation, or the air is cooled by adiabatic expansion (rising). This can happen: along warm and cold fronts (frontal lift)where air flows up the side of a mountain and cools as it rises higher into the atmosphere (orographic lift)by the convection caused by the warming of a surface by insolation (diurnal heating)when warm air blows over a colder surface such as a cool body of water. * Clouds can be formed when two air masses below saturation point mix. Examples are breath on a cold day, aircraft contrails and Arctic sea smoke. * The air stays the same temperature but absorbs more water vapor into it until it reaches saturation point. The water in a typical cloud can have a mass of up to several million tonnes. However, the volume of a cloud is correspondingly high, and the net density of the relatively warm air holding the droplets is low enough that air currents below and within the cloud are capable of keeping it suspended. As well, conditions inside a cloud are not static: water droplets are constantly forming and re-evaporating. A typical cloud droplet has a radius on the order of 1 x 10-5 m and a terminal velocity of about 1-2 cm/s. This gives these droplets plenty of time to re-evaporate as they fall into the warmer air beneath the cloud.
A clouds use is to give water to all the plants of earth like water them

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14y ago

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