Re: Clouds

Dear Meghan Hadley;

Clouds that you and I see are water vapor and dust that occurs in the atmosphere. The issue of why they rise to a set altitude and then stop being higher has to do primarily with their molecular weight. This is best seen on an industrial scale with a cracking tower or industrial distilling apparatus. These towers are large towers which are used to separate many items used in industry. The simplest is a Whisky Still. At Jack Daniels Distillery America’s oldest registered Distillery they have a still which that is over 130 feet tall. While I don’t drink and I don’t recommend it, the place is a fun place to go and see if you get the chance to be in rural Lynchburg Tennessee. It is one of the rare places you can actually go see such a still. The Still is packed with glass balls. Each of which causes the rising whiskey to condense and then evaporate again. This prevents boiling splattering mash from rising in the column and contaminating the final product. (Lynchburg Tennessee is about 45 miles north of Huntsville, Alabama and about 75 miles South East of Nashville, TN. The trip is pretty and the place is interesting and there is a lot to see not far away) The same function happens to with everything that collects on the dust in the atmosphere. Eventually the dust and things like that tend to be pushed downward while the gasses rise. At the top of the troposphere these items simply cannot rise any more. If they do they are just too heavy to stay up there. This is a product of the orbital speeds to achieve altitude. If a molecule has a molecular vibration speed of say 16,000 miles per hour which is about the rate Oxygen and Nitrogen have at standard temperature and pressure, (Sea level 30 inches of mercury and 72 degrees F. ) This will allow it to stay at that level. Essentially the air is in orbit at that temperature and pressure and elevation. As it rises with all the junk in it, the orbits of higher elevations require faster and faster speeds. This means that whatever is contained in that air that rises will be along with the air is cooled. This cooling merely represents the exchange of the expressed temperature for orbital speed and elevation. As the air cools with elevation which requires faster speed to sustain, the heavy items in it exchange their energy to the air and they chill and drop out. (This is why clouds require dust to form as these are sites where the exchange by radiation of energy can occur) As the water chills to a lower temperature it changes state from a gas to a liquid. At lower temperatures it changes directly from a gas to a solid (ice). At the pressures of high altitude it is rare for liquid water to exist. It rapidly goes directly from gas to solid state. The result is that the tops of most clouds are frozen. As this occurs the ice will carry upward as a fine powder for some distance but as the air becomes thinner at the higher altitudes these fine ice crystals actually just fall out.

There is a point at the top of a cloud where there simply is no more energy to suspend the water. The orbit is too high to support solid water. The little bit of water that exists above that point rapidly finds something to attach to and drop. There is a lot of dust coming down from outer space that helps with this. Many scientists wonder about the dust from airplane exhausts and such and what effect it has. To date nobody I know of had a good answer to that. In any case dust keeps raining down and the water keeps falling out. The top of the troposphere is the point where thermal updrafts merely loose the ability to support water in the atmosphere. This is rather like you having a boiling pot on the kitchen stove and the splatters will only go about so high. (Don’t do this as an experiment without being careful to protect yourself from the possibility of burns as boiling water burns skin quickly) Several Gasses have very high speeds of molecular vibration. Hydrogen Gas vibrates at nearly 26,000 miles per hour. That is fast enough to rise completely away from earth orbit. Helium gas travels at about 25,000 miles per hour. That is what makes a Helium balloon rise. Convection of any item is limited by the fact that items will rise to the elevation determined by their orbital speed. If their speed is lower than their position you will see this expressed as a downward force in the environment. When two items are fluid together or displacing one in a fluid there develops a ratio of the speed of one item against the speed of another. An objects speed is the sum of all molecule speeds in that object divided by the number of molecules in it. Since Helium is going 25,000 miles per hour it can be contained in a structure that is slower such as a balloon and the sum of the balloon speeds and the helium speeds adds up to an orbit where the balloon floats up in the atmosphere. It is said to displace air by this means. The energetic helium bumps the air out of the way. (This is the principal of floating a boat) A boat does this by pushing air which is very fast down into the water so that the net speed of the boat molecules equals the water pushed out of the way. Everything that you know of has this molecular speed. Iron has a speed of about 5,000 miles per hour at room temperature at sea level. This is what gives anything its behavior to make chemical reactions. When an item is so cold that it has almost no motion it is considered to be close to absolute zero. None of this motion appears to your eye. It is over very small distances. You feel this motion as temperature and cannot see it as motion. What is curious here is that any item whose molecular or atomic speed is high enough will rise to the orbit indicated by that speed. This is a very important scientific principal that has been known for over 100 years.

Check out NASA for more information on this at http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/NASA_homepage.html

Look at their mission to planet earth.

By the way if you will notice I did not discuss GRAVITY here. There is a reason but I will leave you to figure it out. Hint. See if you can get the formulas for calculating an orbit from a college Physics text.

Sincerely
Paul Noel
Harvest, Al USA
ltree@ro.com