CloudBusting: Can You Kill Clouds With Your Mind?

Someone who I gave an AccuWeather tour to last month said that when she was a kid (in the days when kids actually bothered to look up at the sky) they used to play a game called "Cloud Busting."

The game goes like this: On a day with puffy clouds, find the smallest cloud and stare at it. Eventually, it will dissipate. OK, so is it true? I captured 70 minutes of video from The StarDot NetCam AccuCam over the past couple weeks and sped it up to only be a minute and a half. If you watch the video below, you'll find out that what she said is true - even for larger clouds. Watch it long enough and it will disappear.

Why is this? It's simply because the atmosphere is too chaotic for clouds to last very long, especially the puffy Cumulus clouds that you see in the video. Because air is typically clear, you can't see it but the atmosphere is a complex series of millions of swirls of temperature and humidity interacting with each other and the air passing through is like a leaf in a stream -- actually since air is more "fragile" it would be more like bubbles in a stream - they don't last very long either. The only clouds that can survive for long are thunderstorms (and even they don't last that long), wave clouds that are caught in an unusually stable part of the atmosphere, or high clouds (like Cirrus) that are high above the turbulent lower atmosphere.