Fun Facts about Clouds

Clouds. Those fluffy puffs in the sky that sometimes look like UFOs, sometimes ducks but mainly whatever your imagination tells you.

The average person doesn't know too much about them, though they are a constant part of our life. How do they even appear in the sky?

Here is a short explanation: “When moist, warm air rises to a cooler elevation, and water condenses onto microscopic dust-like “seeds”, bacteria or ash. Air and seeds that updraft = clouds.”

I know this way too scientific so here are a couple of fun facts about them that you might find interesting:

1. It takes somewhere between a few minutes and an hour for clouds to be created

2. Other planets in our solar system also have clouds, including sulfur-dioxide clouds on Venus and ammonia clouds on Saturn and Jupiter. Scientists at NASA recently discovered what seems to be a permanent hurricane on Saturn’s north pole, where red and green clouds reaching the size of Texas are ravaging the planet’s landscape.

3. In Iran, clouds are a good omen.

4. The classic white cloud is known as "cumulus".

5. Hindus and Buddhists believe that cumulus clouds are the spiritual cousins of elephants.

6. There is an official international Cloud Committee

7. There are currently a number of projects in motion to create and modify clouds. NASA’s ATREX Cloud project involves launching rockets 65 miles into the atmosphere, where they eject a cocktail of chemicals into the atmosphere that react with the oxygen and water to create clouds.

8. You can do the exact opposite as well. It’s called cloud seeding. The Chinese government seeded clouds ahead of the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony to create a downpour elsewhere and keep the stadium dry. But this process is creating political conflict in China between neighboring regions, which are accusing each other of "stealing rain", so it's a rather controversial procedure.

9. Some people claim that they can make clouds disappear via a technique called cloud-bursting. This method was depicted in the great Hollywood movie called “The Men who Stare at Goats” with George Clooney:

Why are the online storage systems are called cloud storage?

There is a fairly simple explanation to it. The origins of the word “cloud” in relation to computers is obscure, it appears that the use of stylized clouds in early network diagrams made some users call networks clouds. As the internet is a large network, some early adopters in the 90s called the internet “the cloud”. This phrase was then given to today’s online storage solutions. 

What is the nicest or craziest cloud formation you have seen? Comment below or tell us on our Facebook page!