This document discusses various types of clouds and precipitation. It describes how different lifting mechanisms like orographic lifting and frontal wedging can cause clouds to form. It explains the temperature changes that occur during adiabatic expansion and cooling. It also outlines the different categories of clouds based on height (high, middle, low clouds) and discusses fog, rain, snow, sleet and hail.

1. Clouds and Precipitation

2. Adiabatic Temp. Change and Expansion
and cooling
• Unsaturated air
• Wet adiabatic rat is always lower than dry
• Temp. changes happen even if heat isn’t
added or subtracted.

3. Orographic Lifting
• Occurs when elevated terrains act bas barriers
to the air flow.
• Air goes up a mountain slope, is compresses
and cooling often generates clouds.
• Many rainiest places have windward slopes.

4. Frontal Wedging
• Masses of warm air and cold air collide
• Denser air acts, less dense air rises
• Middle-latitude are used for storm systems

5. Convergence
• Air masses forces air to rise
• The lower it is, it starts to lift
• Warm days the air is from the ocean to the
land

6. Localized Convective Lifting
• Warm days, unequal heating of Earths surface
may cause some pockets of air to be warmed
• Warming of air is called thermal
• Process the products rising thermals is
localizes convection lifting.

7. Stability
• Air is forced to rise
• Temperature would drop because of
expansion
• Volume of air was cooler than the surrounding
environment.

8. Condensation
• Happens when water vapor in the air changes
to a liquid
• For condensation to occur, the air must be
saturated
• Saturated occurs at dew point or when water
vapor is added in the air

9. Types of clouds
• Cirrus- clouds are high, white, occur ad
patches
• Cumulus- consist if rounded individual cloud
mass, have flat bases
• Stratus- are like sheets, or a layer that covers
most the of sky

10. High Clouds
• All high clouds are thin & white.
• Temperature is low with small quantities of
water vapor presents a high altitude
• Clouds are not considered precipitation
markers

11. Middle clouds
• Range to 2000 to 6000 meters
• Have prefix of alto
• White to grayish color of sheet

12. Low Clouds
• Stratus, Stratocumulus, and Nimbostratus
• cloud growth is a type in common when air id
forced upwards
• Stable air can result in a cloud layer that is
largely horicaontal

13. Clouds Of Vertical Development
• Clouds don’t fit into any of the three height
categories.
• Have bases in low height range but extended
upward
• Once upward movement is triggered,
acceleration is powerful, clouds with great
vertical rang form.

14. Fog
• No difference between fog and a cloud
• Defined as a cloud
• When fog is dense, visibility may be few dozen
meters for less

15. Cold Clouds Precipitation
• Relies on two physical processes: super
cooling and supersaturating
• Cloud droplets to not freeze at 0c
• Rainfall can deal with clouds located below
the freeing point

16. Warm Clouds Precipitation
• Mechanism forms raindrops, in the collision-
coalscence process
• Salt can remove water vapor form the air
• Large droplets move through clouds, collide
and coalesce

17. Rain and Snow
• Rain mean drops of water falling from clouds
• Snow melt and continue their descent as rain
before they reach the ground
• Light, fluffy snow made up of individual six-
sides ice crystals

18. Sleet, Glaze and hail
• Sleet is the fall of small particles of clear to
translucent ice
• Glaze is known for freezing rain, raindrops
become super-cooled
• Hail is produced in cumulonimbus clouds,
hailstones begin as small ice pellets that grow
by collection super-cooled water droplets