Water mass500,000 kg
18.5 quintillionRed blood cell weights
1.4 thousandthsEmpire State Building masses
200 millionUS pennies
Typical fair-weather cumulus
Photo from Wikimedia Commons
Cumulus Cloud
The puffy white cloud that looks like everything and weighs nothing... right?/Weather & Climate
A typical cumulus cloud -- the fluffy, flat-bottomed variety you drew as a child -- contains roughly 500,000 kilograms of water in the form of tiny suspended droplets. That is about 500 metric tons floating overhead, held aloft by updrafts of warm air. The average cumulus spans about a kilometer across and occupies a billion cubic meters of sky at an altitude of around 2,000 meters. They form and dissolve in minutes to hours, which is a lot of drama for something that is 99.99997% air.
Measurements
Volume1 billion m^3
20 billionKitchen trash cans
2 billionRefrigerator interiors
20 quadrillionRaindrops
Approximately 1 cubic kilometer
Typical altitude (base)2,000 m
52,493Silver dollar diameters
34.5 billionthsMercury orbit radii
1,667Coffee table lengths
Above ground level
Horizontal extent1,000 m
365Pool tables
8.3 billionCoronaviruses
937Hurdle heights