Léa, 6 years old: “Can the clouds fall? "

• Whether clouds appear or disappear is related to air temperature, according to our partner The Conversation.

• Even if they sometimes seem motionless, clouds are often in perpetual transformation: they are constantly forming and dissipating.

• The analysis of this phenomenon was carried out by Brice Boudevillain, hydro-meteorologist at the Institute of Environmental Geosciences of the University of Grenoble Alpes (UGA).

To answer your question, you must first know what clouds are: they appear where the air contains enough water vapor (an invisible gas that is formed when water evaporates, such as when we heat the water to cook pasta) and that it is cold enough.

Then the water vapor turns (it condenses) into fine droplets or tiny particles of ice that we can then see.

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Take the example of fog, which is a cloud: it forms when the air is very humid (i.e. it contains a lot of water vapor) and when it has cooled enough ( as is often the case at the end of the night or the beginning of the morning).

Conversely, clouds disappear (in reality, they evaporate) when the amount of water vapor decreases or it gets a little warmer.

If we take the example of fog, the latter generally dissipates during the morning as soon as the air temperature has risen sufficiently.

Different shapes of clouds © Vectoro Artworks / Vecteezy.com

In a cloud, the droplets and particles of ice are so small that they remain suspended in the air, moving with the winds.

In reality, they fall very gently, but they evaporate as soon as they find themselves in less humid or warmer air.

And when, on the contrary, water vapor is transported by the wind to colder and already very humid places, part of it condenses and a cloud is created.

So clouds, even if they sometimes seem motionless, are often in perpetual transformation: they are constantly forming and dissipating.

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Finally sometimes, in the clouds, droplets manage to grow or ice particles assemble between them: It forms raindrops or snowflakes.

These particles then start to really fall.

It is no longer a question of clouds but of what is called "precipitation".

In this case, yes, we can say that the cloud is "falling".

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This analysis was written by Brice Boudevillain, hydro-meteorologist at the Institute of Environmental Geosciences of the University of Grenoble Alpes (UGA).

The original article was published on The Conversation website.

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