Tell Me Why?

An informative site covering interesting and factual topics with concise answers to pondering questions. Tap into the collective wisdom of factual knowledge designed to educate all knowledge seekers. Tell Me Why: Answer your Questions and Satisfy your Curiosity. New content is published once each week.

Free Stuff | • How To Use Site | Top News Videos

Why are Clouds White?

Published Friday, June 22, 2007 by R. Edmondson | E-mail this post

A cloud is a visible accumulation of very tiny water droplets or solid ice crystals that float in the air (troposphere). Clouds are usually white in appearance due to the fact that it reflects (scatter) all the visible wavelengths of light from the sun.

The sun’s light, as explained in a previous post Why is the Sky Blue?, is made up of different colors (rainbow colors) that appear as a white light when combined. These colors can be demonstrated using a prism that scatters the Sun’s light (white light ).

The water droplets or ice crystals that make up the cloud reflect all the light of the seven visible wavelengths (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet) all together without dispersing each color. Thus, clouds are white because they effectively reflect the wavelengths of visible light spectrum of the sun (called Mie scattering) in all directions more or less equally.

Related Articles:
Why is the Sky Blue?
What is a rainbow?
Where do objects get their colors from?

Labels: Colors, Physical Geography, Science

0 Responses to “Why are Clouds White?”

Headline | Using Site | MyGame

Message Board Tell Me Why

FeedBack Appreciated

Please spare some time to give your feedback about this site. Thanks in advance.

Click Here For Form

Message from the Author

I'm R. Edmondson
From United States

I am excited to be the author of this site that gives me the opportunity and challenge to answer questions of the intellectual mind. As such, Tell Me Why site is used as a learning tool to provide a stimulating learning environment for general knowledge development; to promote increased diversity on the online learning community and to incorporate the site’s informative quality content with the best of online communication platform (blog) in making knowledge accessible and free to all.

Thanks for stopping by my site. I hope you will find this site interesting and informative and that you do learn something before you leave here.

Please take the time to drop me a few lines and do come again.

Thanks for the support