The Mass of Hurricanes Converted to More Familiar Units: Cats & Dogs & Elephants

Discoblog
By Jennifer Welsh
Sep 30, 2010 3:03 AMNov 20, 2019 12:48 AM
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If you were to calculate how much a hurricane weighs, what units would you pick? To understand how much water is in a cloud, it seems many researchers pick the good ole elephant unit, or sometimes a blue whale. Choosing some of the largest animals on the planet gives everyone a better sense of just how much water is up there in the clouds. Calculating the number of elephants in a small white puffy cloud will start to give you a sense of just how many elephants to expect from your average hurricane. Andy Heymsfield of the National Center for Atmospheric Research told NPR's science correspondent Robert Krulwich that a single, small, white, cotton-ball cloud weighs about the same as 100 (4-ton) elephants:

"I think the dimensions are somewhat deceiving," clouds, he says, look small when you are down on the ground, but very often they are much bigger than you think.

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