Clouds are incredible. Their endless shapes can add beauty to a sunny afternoon or terror to a day marked by tragedy. When you look at how diverse these billowing formations of atmospheric water are, it’s easy to forget that they’re just that—atmospheric water. Even so, there’s much more to clouds than meets the eye. Here are 15 interesting tidbits about these mainstays of everyday life.

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• A cloud is a large group of tiny water droplets that we can see in the air.
• It takes somewhere between a few minutes and an hour for clouds to be created
• Clouds are formed when water on Earth evaporates into the sky and condenses high up in the cooler air. Learn more about the water cycle.
• The classic white cloud is known as "cumulus".
• Rain, snow, sleet and hail falling from clouds is called precipitation.
• Most clouds form in the troposphere (the lowest part of Earth’s atmosphere) but occasionally they are observed as high as the stratosphere or mesosphere.
• Hindus and Buddhists believe that cumulus clouds are the spiritual cousins of elephants.
• Clouds can contain millions of tons of water.
• There are a range of different types of clouds, the main types include stratus, cumulus and cirrus.
• High-level clouds start at 20,000ft and are made up of ice crystals – whereas clouds lower down are made up of water droplets.
• Stratus clouds are flat and featureless, appearing as layered sheets.
• Green clouds often mean a tornado is coming.
• Cumulus clouds are puffy, like cotton floating in the sky.
• An average cloud weighs 216 thousand pounds. An average storm cloud weighs 105.8 million pounds.
• Cirrus clouds are thin and wispy, appearing high in the sky.
• NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds. 
• There are many variations of these 3 main cloud types including stratocumulus, altostratus, altocumulus, cirrostratus and cirrocumulus.
• There is an official international Cloud Committee
• Fog is stratus type of cloud that appears very close to the ground.
•  Venus has clouds made up of sulfur dioxide and sulphuric acid – Saturn and Jupiter have ammonia clouds.
• Clouds can also be made of other chemicals.
• Altostratus clouds are low and gray or white. They cover the whole sky and look soft. They mean snow or rain is coming.
• Other planets in our Solar System have clouds. Venus has thick clouds of sulfur-dioxide
• Planet Kepler 7b has clouds made of silica particles, so it rains molten liquid glass
• while Jupiter and Saturn have clouds of ammonia.

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