Daily Devotions
God Sends the Rain
Reading for March 8th: Deuteronomy 28-29
The LORD will open to you his good treasury, the heavens, to give the rain to your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hands.
Deuteronomy 28:12
How much does a cloud weigh?
Peggy LeMone, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado has done the numbers. The water in a small cumulus cloud weighs about 550 tons according to her estimates.
She wanted to put this figure in something more meaningful, so she converted this to elephants. Assuming an average elephant weighs six tons, that would mean a cumulus cloud would be 100 elephants!
What keeps it up there?
"First of all, the water isn't in elephant sized particles, it's in tiny, tiny, tiny particles," explained LeMone.
And those tiny particles float on the warmer air that is rising from below, but still, the idea of so much water up in the sky floating around was surprising, even to a meteorologist like LeMone.
She said, "I had no idea how much a cloud would weigh, actually, when I started the calculations."
What about a big storm cloud? How much would it weigh?
LeMone did the numbers: About 200,000 elephants!
What about a hurricane? You won't believe this...
"What we're doing is weighing the water in one cubic meter theoretically pulled from a cloud and then multiplying by the number of meters in a whole hurricane," explained LeMone.
The estimation? Forty million elephants!
That's a lot of water.
And it's a great God that holds it up there.
You are a great God! You fill the storm clouds with water and hold their massive weight in the sky. We praise you for your awesome power.
