Water Vapor
What happens when you drive through fog or
mist? Your windshield gets wet.
What happens when you're hiking in the mountains, and a cloud
blows over you? You get wet.
When it's a really humid day in Florida, is your vision
blocked? No, generally the air is perfectly clear.
Water vapor is a GAS. Individual molecules, and you
can't see them. On the other hand, clouds, mist,
and fog are LIQUID water, very small droplets, but liquid
nonetheless.
Most clouds
are water droplets (liquid)
If you can SEE it, it CANNOT be a gas (vapor). What we
normally call "humidity" is gaseous water,
or water vapor. It is invisible.
The only exceptions to clouds being liquid water are very
high clouds in very cold air. Cirrus clouds, for instance,
the high, wispy clouds you see on nice days, are so high that the
water is frozen into very small (dust size) crystals. But
that's a solid, so it's still not vapor.
Cirrus Clouds - ice crystals
This also brings up an important issue: "Steam". Look at the
images below of a teapot boiling.
When you boil water in a teapot such as the one
above, you get a visible cloud of what we usually call "steam"
coming out of the spout. But when you pass your hand through
that cloud, it gets wet, doesn't it? So that's not water
vapor, it's liquid water droplets. Not particularly
hot, because it's already condensed. Effectively, it's a
small, artificial cloud.
On the other hand, that little gap between the steam cloud and the
spout of the teapot? Do not EVER put yourself into that
gap. The reason is that in that gap, true steam is present -
actual, gaseous water vapor. It is often called
"live steam". The problem is that if you stick your finger
(for example) there, your finger is so much colder than the steam
that you'll immediately get condensation of water. And for
every gram of water that condenses on your finger, 540 calories
(the Heat of Vaporization) will be absorbed by your skin - and
you'll immediately receive a very bad burn.
In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, steam
boilers sometimes catastrophically ruptured. Many
people were killed, some certainly from the impact of the
explosion, but many because of being enveloped by live steam which
condensed on them, with the result that they received 2nd and 3rd
degree burns over most of their bodies. You don't survive
that kind of injury.
So what do we see when we look at clouds?
- They are not water vapor. Water vapor is
a gas, which means it is composed of individual molecules of H2O,
which are too small for our eyes to see or to block
light. As we can notice on very humid days in Florida,
water vapor is transparent.
- Most clouds, along with fog and mist, are
large masses of very small water droplets, suspended in the
air. This is why they block vision, and why if you drive
through them (or an airplane flies through them), your
windshield gets wet.
- A few very high clouds (Cirrus clouds are
the most common example) are high enough that the temperature
is below zero Celcius, allowing the small water droplets to
freeze. So these clouds are composed of dust-sized ice
crystals.
- When the water droplets or ice
crystals get big enough to fall to the ground, we get rain
or snow.
- If turbulence repeatedly
forces water droplets high enough to freeze, we get hail.