rain clouds

[DaveH3]

Does anyone out there know how high or deep a rain cloud ( nimbus or cu nimbus ) has to be to put down 1 inch of rain on the ground? At an average rate of rain fall over say a few hours?

[gumboil]

It's late in the night and I may be a bit thick here, but I don't see how this question can be answered.

When you speak of one inch of rain on the ground, over what area are you talking about? One inch of rain over half a square mile is a considerably less water than one inch of rain over ten square miles.

Because the water volume deposited on the land ( or the sea for that matter) is different in both cases above, the capacity of the cloud and therefore it's dimensions must also differ - it stands to reason that the cloud capable of depositing one inch of rain over ten square miles has a greater water holding capacity.

I await being corrected on this matter which seems quite logicl to me.

[chamois]

I can't fault gumboil's logic although I have little doubt that the amateur meteorologists may have a different opinion.

This one inch of rain business has always fascinated me. i can't recall having ever read of a standard diameter of collection container when it comes to rainfall. One inch of rainfall in a container six inches in diameter is a hell of a sight less than one inch of rainfall in a one inch diameter container.

[NiceCupOfTea]

As far as I'm aware, a cloud can be as high and wide as it wants to be, it will keep its water in until it finds me.

Chamois - we used to do a �rain-fall-erometer' in school. You take a bottle of lemonade and dig in into the ground a bit so it won�t fall over (about six inches). It has to be a bottle with a flat inside though.

You then stick a funnel into its end that is exactly the same diameter. The funnel being the same diameter as the bottle is really important.

Then you see how much water the bottle collects. You measure this in inches (or cms) from the base of the bottle to the top of the amount of water collected. This tells you how much rain fell in the area of ground you were measuring.

If your bottle and funnel were both the same inches wide, then that means that the amount of inches in your bottle were the inches of rain that fell in the time you were doing the experiment for