Why are rain clouds black?

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Rain clouds are dark instead of white because of their thickness, or height. That is, a cloud gets thicker and denser as it gathers more water droplets and ice crystals — the thicker it gets, the more light it scatters, resulting in less light penetrating all the way through it. The particles on the...
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Rain clouds are dark instead of white because of their thickness, or height. That is, a cloud gets thicker and denser as it gathers more water droplets and ice crystals — the thicker it gets, the more light it scatters, resulting in less light penetrating all the way through it. The particles on the underside of the rain cloud don't have a lot of light to scatter to your eyes, so the base appears dark as you look on from the ground below. read less
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B.Tech(EC/EE/IN),Math(IX,X,XI,XII std.),Physics(IX,X,XI,XII std.) CBSE/ICSE/IB.

However, rain clouds are gray instead of white because of their thickness, or height.
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rain clouds are gray instead of white because of their thickness, or height. That is, a cloud gets thicker and denser as it gathers more water droplets and ice crystals — the thicker it gets, the more light it scatters, resulting in less light penetrating all the way through it.
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Holistic Healer

Rain clouds are gray because of their thickness and height. The cloud gets thicker because it gathers more ice crystals and more water droplets. The thicker it gets the more light it scatters resulting in less light penetrating all the way through it
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Energetic Thinker and Doer

because of their thickness or height
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Dedicated Teacher With Lots of Teaching Experience In Maths For All Boards

There are two things going on to make some rain clouds to appear very dark. The first is that some clouds, especially thunderstorm clouds such as nimbocumulus clouds can tower to great heights with tops 15 to 20 km (50-60 thousand feet) above the earth. Plus these clouds, which tend to produce very heavy...
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There are two things going on to make some rain clouds to appear very dark. The first is that some clouds, especially thunderstorm clouds such as nimbocumulus clouds can tower to great heights with tops 15 to 20 km (50-60 thousand feet) above the earth. Plus these clouds, which tend to produce very heavy rains and hail are very dense, being full of water vapor and raindrops at lower altitudes and ice crystals at high altitude. As a result, it is more difficult for sunlight to pass through these clouds than it is for light to pass through neighboring clouds which aren't as high and dense. More of the light is reflected back into space or sideways because there's more obstacles. Plus, there's more absorption of the light on its way through the cloud, because the light will bounce around very much and take a very long total path before finally coming out the bottom of the cloud. The second effect which enhances our perception of a dark cloud has to do with how the human eye and brain perceive light and color. We don't judge brightness and color very accurately in an absolute sense; rather, our perception of one part of a scene is affected by what else is going on in the scene.A similar thing is going on with the clouds: a region of the sky is darker because less light is passing through the cloud, but we perceive the cloud to be even darker and blacker than it is because it's surrounded by brighter clouds. read less
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