Very Damp Toast.

How much does a cloud weigh? It’s the sort of question I’ve often asked myself while dancing across a field barefoot in a frilly skirt. I’ve been thinking about water a lot lately after seeing babies drinking ditchwater on Sport Relief and being ill. They need clean water and the water in air must be pretty fresh but even if you run around with your mouth open all day you can’t get much. It’s locked in and wafting about but how much is there? Well air at sea level has a density of 1.22Kg per cubic meter. That’s like the same as a 2.5lb bag of sugar! Air weighs that much!? And the water in air is very roughly 1% of that, ie 12 grams. So assuming a cup is 250cubic cms i.e. 250 grams you could get a cup of water from a room 3x3 meters or air at 1m/sec passing through a tube of 1sq meter section in 20 seconds. That’s a litre of clean drinking water every one and a half minutes. Wouldn’t that be a solution? Anyway I’m working on it. So back to how much a cloud weighs. I’ve picked as a example a 1km x 1 km cumulous cloud that extends 1km up, a typical English cloud. It floats by the way because wet air is less dense than dry air which is a bit counterintuitive but true. And it would weigh, wait for it, one million metric tons!! Yes if that fluffy grey think fell on my head mid way across the field in my frilly skirt I’d be toast. You’re just not safe anywhere these days.