Can you touch a cloud? You probably already have

They look like giant cotton balls floating through the sky. So if you could somehow reach one, can you touch a cloud?

Yes. But forget the fluffy pillow you’ve imagined since you were a kid. You wouldn’t grab a handful of cloud, squeeze it between your fingers or bounce on top of it.

In fact, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve already touched one.

Wait, when have I ever touched a cloud?

Remember the last time you walked outside on a foggy morning? You were standing inside a cloud.

Fog is essentially a cloud at ground level. That means walking through thick fog is about as close as most of us will ever get to strolling through one of those beautiful clouds we watch floating overhead.

And now think about what that fog felt like against your skin. It wasn’t fluffy. You didn’t bump into anything or feel something floating past your fingers. It was simply cool, damp air.

Which is kind of wild when you think about it. Something that can look enormous and almost solid from miles away can practically disappear once you’re inside it.

So if you really have touched a cloud, what exactly was touching your skin?

What is your hand actually touching inside a cloud?

Tiny drops of water. One of the biggest misconceptions about clouds is that they’re simply masses of water vapor. Water vapor is actually an invisible gas.

The cloud you can see appears when that vapor condenses into enormous numbers of tiny liquid droplets or, depending on the cloud and temperature, ice crystals. Those droplets are suspended throughout the air rather than packed together into a solid object.

Imagine walking into a bathroom after somebody took a very hot shower, except the droplets can be even tinier and spread through an enormous volume of air. Your hand isn’t really touching the cloud as though the cloud were an object. Your hand is moving through air filled with microscopic pieces of water.

But if there are so many water droplets in there, shouldn’t you get soaking wet?

Would touching a cloud make you wet?

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A little, potentially. But probably not the way you’re imagining.

The individual droplets in a typical liquid cloud are incredibly small and light. That’s precisely why they can remain suspended in the atmosphere instead of immediately falling as rain.

Spend enough time moving through dense fog and you may notice moisture collecting on your hair, glasses, eyelashes or clothing. So you really can emerge from a cloud slightly damp.

But now we’ve created a much stranger problem. If a cloud contains all that water, how can something made of water float?

How can all that water stay in the sky?

Here’s where clouds become wonderfully deceptive. A small cumulus cloud can contain an astonishing amount of water. UCAR estimates that one might weigh around 550 tons, roughly the weight of 100 elephants.

And yet it floats over your head.

The trick is that those hundreds of tons aren’t sitting together in one giant blob. They’re distributed among an enormous number of microscopic droplets spread across a huge volume of air. Each individual droplet is so small that its fall through the surrounding air is extremely slow, while rising and turbulent air can help keep those droplets suspended.

Think about dust floating through a beam of sunlight. A huge amount of dust could weigh quite a bit altogether, but an individual speck is so tiny that it can hang in the air.

Clouds pull off something similar on an enormous scale.

Eventually, though, those cloud droplets can grow. And once they become large enough, the cloud has another trick for you.

When does a cloud stop floating and start raining?

A cloud doesn’t suddenly decide to dump its water. Its tiny droplets have to grow large enough to fall effectively through the air.

That can happen as droplets collide and combine. Ice processes also play an important role in producing precipitation in many clouds. Once the particles become sufficiently large, gravity becomes much more effective at pulling them toward the ground.

So the difference between the cloud floating above you and the raindrops landing on your head isn’t that one is water and the other isn’t. It’s largely what that water is doing and how big those particles have become.

Which brings us back to that cloud you’ve always wanted to touch.

So what would touching a cloud really feel like?

Not cotton. Not marshmallow. And not much of anything solid at all.

If you could safely reach into a typical low liquid-water cloud, you’d experience something much closer to cool, damp fog moving across your skin. Visibility around you could become milky white, tiny droplets might accumulate on exposed surfaces, and the magnificent object that looked so solid from miles away would seemingly disappear around you.

That’s perhaps the coolest thing about finally touching a cloud.

From far away, a cloud looks like an object. From inside one, it’s an atmosphere.

So the next time fog settles over your neighborhood and somebody complains about the gloomy morning, walk outside for a second. Look at the tiny droplets collecting on the grass and feel that cool dampness against your face.

Then remember what you’re standing in.

The sky came all the way down to let you touch it.

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