News 15. Weight of Hurricane Cloud Equivalent to Forty Million Elephants.

News 15. Weight of Hurricane Cloud Equivalent to Forty Million Elephants. [WORDS] * prospective : n. 시각, 견지 * puffy : a. 부푼, 팽창된 * cumulus cloud : 【기상】 적운(積雲) * meteorologist : n. 기상학자 * convert : v. 환산하다, 전환하다 * particle : n. 입자, 분자. 미립자 * roughly : = about 대략, 약 * cubic meter : n. 입방미터 * in all : ad. 전부 해서, 합계.., 죄다 * multiply : v. 곱하다 ==================================================================== Finally from us this evening, weather. Now that fall is beginning, maybe it will be better in many parts of the country than it was through the summer. Though we are now entering what the weather forecasters tell us is the most active period of hurricane season. We were talking to ABC's Robert Krulwich today about how to measure a hurricane's power. And Robert, as always, had an unusual prospective. Before we do hurricanes, let's start with a very simple white puffy cloud. You know the kind? "Uh-huh. Cumulus cloud." And how much, I asked meteorologist Peggy LeMone, does a cloud like this weigh? Just the water in the cloud, not the air. "The water in a little cloud weighs about 550 tons." Five hundred fif..., did you just say five hundred and fifty tons? "That's right. Or if you want to convert it to something that might be a little bit more meaningful, if you assume an elephant has about 6 tons of weight, that would be about a hundred elephants." So, in one little cloud, you will find one hundred elephants' weight of water, which raises the question 'How do they stay up there?' "First of all, the water isn't in elephant-sized particles. It's in tiny, tiny, tiny particles." So, let's take the next step and ask how many elephant units of water would you find in a big storm cloud that's ten times bigger all the way around than the puffy cloud. Dr. LeMone did the numbers. "And that would give you about two hundred thousand elephants." Two Hundred Thousand Elephants. All right. Now, a hurricane. Dr. LeMone imagined a hurricane roughly the size of her home state, Missouri. Now, what we're doing is real weighing the water in one cubic meter theoretically pulled from a cloud, and we are multiplying by the number of meters in a whole hurricane. "And when we go through the same exercise, we come up with a figure, I think, of forty million elephants." So, the water in one hurricane weighs more than all the elephants on the planet and maybe even in all the elephants that have ever lived on the planet. That is a lot of water. Robert Krulwich, ABC News.