| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Water Vapor | is evaporated from earth's surface into air. |
| a cooling mechanism | to condense the water vapor into liquid or ice. Rising air is the cooling mechanism is create clouds. The rising air cools due to the adiabatic process. Fog is formed by five different cooling mechanisms. The name of the fog relates to that specific cooling mechanism. |
| Condensation nuclei | such as smoke, pollen, dust, pollution,etc. that provides a surface for vapor to condense onto. |
| Collision-Coalescence | occus in clouds when larger liquid cloud droplets fall through the cloud and collide with smaller droplets that are either suspended in the cloud ot falling more slowly than the larger droplets. Once the collision occurs, the large and small droplets coalesce (join) to create a new larger droplet. The end result is an extremely large droplet called a raindrop leaving the cloud at the bottom. |
| Bergeron Process | occurs when a cloud is supercooled. A supercooled cloud is one that contains both liquid droplets and also ice crystals. The cloud temperature must be at or below freezing in order for this process to occur. Bergeron process occurs because water vapor molecules "prefer" to deposit onto an ice crystal (deposition) rather than to condense into a liquid droplet. Therefore, when water leaves a liquid droplet in the form of a vapor, that vapor will deposit itself onto a nearby ice crystal. Once water vapor begins to deposit onto the ice crystal there are two results: the ice crystals grow and cloud droplets evaporate (thus getting smaller). When the ice crystal leaves the cloud it will be large enough to be called a snowflake. |
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