Pippin's Question Box

How do clouds break into smaller clouds?

Ok, when gathering inforamtion on this topic I got ALOT of reasons why clouds can break apart, so I am going to give you one word to sum it all up; Tempreture.

Many professors, scientist and other very smart people predicted that brightness and tempreture changes and non-Brownian movements can cause clouds to break to any size.

Non-Brownian movement is the fast movement of particles sustained in a liquid. Dr. Robert Brown first experimented this idea in the 1800's. Now, I do not completely understand this but I will tell you what I found:

***Einstein believed that there waas some connection between thermal energy and Brownian movement. This famous man once said "Under the microscope one, to some extent, immediately sees a part of thermal energy, in the form of mechanical energy and moving particles."

***This combined with the law of radiation (high tempertures) and it turned into "the breaking of clouds, etc"

So basically, clouds are broken up because of these fast particles in the liquid, and the brightness (tempreture) outside.

I think this example might apply. When it is sunny outside clouds usually are fluffy and not really bunched up but more, like stratus clouds etc, that might be because of the tempreture and brightness outside, the particles in a liquid move rapidly, breaking the cloud. Verses on a gloomy day when the clouds are thich and gray and the tempreture is cold and it is not bright, the clouds tend to be big and gray this might be because of the light that is not there.

I hope I explained this right! :)

I got my info from:

http://www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/theo1/hanggi/History/Renn.pdf

Tried my best :)