why do clouds float in air even though they contain water?
547960
The water is in the form of a vapor or gas, like steam.  When the vapor becomes concentrated enough to form droplets, it turns to rain.
56788
I can answer half of this question, I think. Clouds are water (H2O) in vapor (gaseous) form. Water floating in a classroom? Its still H2O but you'll need to get either a plumber or an HVAC technician to answer that!
279658
Ice floats on water because it is less dense than water, meaning it has fewer molecules per volume. This is because of the Hydrogen bonds. In fact, while other substances contract when solidified, water expands. That's why it's less dense, and not because it has air inside. Furthermore, when the temperature decreases and reaches 4 degrees Celsius, every water molecule is Hydrogen-bonded to 4 other molecules near it. Then, they form into a crystal lattice structure, and it holds them further apart.
478405
Clouds act as an insulator to trap in the heat. When there are no clouds, the heat can leave the earth more quickly.
606380
Clouds are tiny droplets of water that have condensed on condensation nuclei such as pollen, dust, ash, & pollution in the troposphere.\n\nB/c they are very tiny and independant of each other, they tend to be suspended. This is due to various things such as updrafts, winds, etc. They are very lightweight. Only when they begin to start growing in size will gravity take over & they start to fall as rain.
655206
This has to do w/ the way it forms in clouds.\n\nAs warm moist air rises, it will expand & cool. When it reaches the dew point, it will condense on particulates in the air such as pollen, dust, salts, pollution, etc. This is the formation of a cloud.\n\nThe condensation nuclei described above is the primary source for the shape of the raindrop that may eventually form from the cloud.\n\nAs the water droplets bump into each other, they will begin to stick, growing larger & larger.\n\nWhen wind currents can no longer hold up the droplets, gravity wins the tug-of-war & the droplet will fall.\n\nSome people mistakenly believe that raindrops are "teardrop" shaped. This is not true. They are spherical as they fall through the atmosphere. That is until they hit something.
756259
Clouds are made of miniscule water droplets.  When you consider how enormous clouds are (in volume), all those water droplets can add up to a very high weight.  Think how heavy a glass of water is.  Now let's try to extrapolate how much vapor that will make -- perhaps 5-10 cubic feet?  Now multiply that number of glasses by how many cubic feet of space a cloud takes up...\n\n<quote>\n\n"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."\n\n</quote>
502136
Actually, it is the rotation of the earth that causes weather and then clouds.\nThe clouds move across the sky as a result of differences in heat between regions. All of the matter around the earth is held to it by gravity. However, clouds "float" in air. So they will move at slightly different speeds. \n\nEver watch when they stir a milkshake? the different colors all swirl similarly.
707708
The droplets that make up clouds freeze all the time, but clouds don't freeze into solid blocks because the particles are too dispersed. In fact, most of the high-altitude clouds you see are made up of frozen droplets.
689575
High up in the atmosphere where rain clouds form, the temperature is freezing cold. At these aktltitudes the water can freeze. If there is turbulance a drop of water can freeze and be caught in an updraft. A layer of water can form around the frozen rain drop, freezing too. Thti small ice ball falls within the cloud and gets caught up in another up draft. If this continues a piece of hail is produced. It becomes too heavy to stay up and falls to the ground.\n\nIn still air the water is  in vapor form and as the temperature falls below freezing point, molecules of water coalesse and form crystals. If the air is freezing cold all the way to the ground, these crystals fall as snow. If the temperature is slightly above freezing point these crystals melt and form sleet.
196335
A ship can float on water because the desity of the ship is less than that of the water arround it.  When I speak of the Density, I speak of the ship as a whole.  The materials can be much more dense than water including steel or even Concrete.  What matters is what is in the ship.  If there is mostly air or something light in the ship, the average desity of the ship is very low and the ship will float high in the water.  If there is a lot of heavy cargo, the ship will float low in the water, unless too much cargo is loaded that is too heavy, then the ship could actually sink.\nWhen the ship is sitting on the water, it is displacing a certain amount of water.  The surrounding water then places pressure upon the ship pushing inward and upward.  The ship, not weighing as much as the water that is displaced is held up by this pressure.  If the wieght of the ship becomes more than what is displaced, then the ship will sink.
150463
There are a couple of reasons that work together to explain this situation. The first one has to do with how raindrops form. \n\nNow, it may seem silly to make such an obvious statement as, "Rain always falls from clouds." But once it has been said, we can then ask, "What is going on inside those clouds?" And that question leads us to plenty of relevant information! \n\nDo you remember the last time your local weather was described as being "hot and humid"? Do you remember what it FELT like? Do you also remember what the air LOOKED like? The reason I am asking these questions is because it is important to know that ordinary water is commonly found in one of three forms: solid, liquid, or gas. The liquid form is what we call "water", while the solid form we call "ice", and the gas form we call "water vapor". Water vapor is colorless, odorless, and invisible. But you sure can FEEL it on a hot and humid day! \n\nNext, do you remember the last time you encountered some fog? Think about what IT looked like. If you looked real close, you would have seen zillions of tiny tiny droplets of water floating in the air. And, if you remember the last time you saw some steam, you might think that it looked just like fog (except it was hotter). Steam is NOT pure water vapor! \n\nWell, it happens that the description, "zillions of tiny tiny droplets of water floating in the air", applies to every fog, to every mist, to every burst of steam -- and to every cloud in the sky. If you sit back and simply watch the clouds for a while, you will see that some clouds grow, some shrink, and some do nothing but move across the sky. What is happening to the growing or shrinking clouds? When a cloud grows, water vapor in the air gradually "condenses" to form lots more tiny tiny droplets. When a cloud shrinks, many droplets are completely "evaporating" to become invisible water vapor. \n\nAs the winds move air across the sky, carrying clouds along, fragments of wind known as "eddys" can do strange things to the shapes of clouds. A common game is to study a cloud's shape and guess what it looks like. Also, winds from different directions can collide with each other, which often has great effects upon clouds. It depends on how cold or warm the colliding winds are, and how much water each wind carries (only the differences matter, not whether the water is in the form of vapor or tiny drops). \n\nFor rain to happen, the weather conditions inside the clouds, and surrounding them, has to cause the droplets to grow. Some droplets will grow by colliding and combining with each other -- just what you Asked about. Some droplets will grow by acquiring more and more water vapor from the air. Some will do both. But the important thing to remember now is that MOST of the droplets in the clouds grow at the same time! \n\nBUT, the droplets do not all grow at the same rate; some grow faster than others. As soon as ANY get big enough, they start to fall out of the cloud. Water is heavier than air, after all. Depending on the wind conditions, those first raindrops might be blown back up into the cloud, where they can grow some more. Eventually, however, they get too big to stay up in the air, so they fall all the way to the ground. And the slower-growing droplets will fall after them, and the slower-growing-yet droplets will fall after THEM, and so on. This is the essence of the raining process. \n\nAs I said at the start, there are a couple of reasons why the raindrops don't combine to make a single stream. The first reason is simply that raindrops start falling just as soon as they are too heavy to stay in the air. The second reason is that they are all falling together DOWNWARDS, not sideways. If the wind blows them sideways, they all move TOGETHER sideways. That isn't good enough to cause them to meet each other, while falling, so they could combine to form a si
149649
Did they look like this? If so, they were nothing more harmful then Lenticular Clouds. Normally, air moves much more horizontally than it does vertically. Sometimes, however, such as when wind comes off of a mountain or a hill, relatively strong vertical oscillations take place as the air stabilizes. The dry air at the top of an oscillation may be quite stratified in moisture content, and hence forms clouds at each layer where the air saturates with moisture. The result can be a lenticular cloud with a strongly layered appearance.
540512
In the clouds as water vapor.
186119
rain comes from clouds. clouds are actually water vapour floating in air. when they become really condensed due to a drop in temperature then they form large drop of water which cant stay afloat and so rain happens.
956501
Air, being in solution, is lost all the time at the top of the glass of water and nobody is aware of it.  Air particles by the same effect tend to break away from the water body at the glass sides and bottom.  Contrary to the top, there is a glass barrier, and air particles simply cluster together as small bubbles.  These bubbles of course become bigger with time and some become big enough to break away and float up to the surface.  This effect is much more apparent if you heat the water lightly as the air in solution expands.
390105
What are clouds?\nA cloud is a large collection of very tiny droplets of water or ice crystals. The droplets are so small and light that they can float in the air. \n\nHow are clouds formed?\nAll air contains water, but near the ground it is usually in the form of an invisible gas called water vapor. When warm air rises, it expands and cools. Cool air can't hold as much water vapor as warm air, so some of the vapor condenses onto tiny pieces of dust that are floating in the air and forms a tiny droplet around each dust particle. When billions of these droplets come together they become a visible cloud. \n\nWhy are clouds white?\nClouds are white because they reflect the light of the sun. Light is made up of colors of the rainbow and when you add them all together you get white. The sun appears a yellow color because it sends out more yellow light than any other color. Clouds reflect all the colors the exact same amount so they look white.\n\nWhy do clouds turn gray?\nClouds are made up of tiny water droplets or ice crystals, usually a mixture of both. The water and ice scatter all light, making clouds appear white. If the clouds get thick enough or high enough all the light above does not make it through, hence the gray or dark look. Also, if there are lots of other clouds around, their shadow can add to the gray or multicolored gray appearance.\n \nWhy do clouds float?\nA cloud forms when air heated by the sun. As it rises, it slowly cools it reaches the saturation point and water condenses, forming a cloud. As long as the cloud and the air that its made of is warmer than the outside air around it, it floats!\n\nHow do clouds move?\nClouds move with the wind. High cirrus clouds are pushed along by the jet stream, sometimes traveling at more than 100 miles-per-hour. When clouds are part of a thunderstorm they usually travel at 30 to 40