Each week, our meteorologists answer a question from readers.

This week’s question comes from Morning Brief reader Leanna, who asks, “Why are clouds most often above us and not among us? They seem to form a certain distance up."

Meteorologist Rob Shackelford: A magnificent question Leanna, and us meteorologists actually have a term for what you are accurately observing.

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The term is “lifting condensation level”, or LCL, for short. I’ll break that down since that is a pretty nerdy yet cool concept.

As hard as it is to imagine, since we are in winter right now, let's say it’s the middle of August, and it’s sweltering hot. You are standing on a parking lot on this hot summer day, one so hot you can feel the bottoms of your shoes melting.

Well, the air can feel it too and will get forced up further into the atmosphere as it gets heated up. Air rising over extremely hot surfaces is just one of the many ways that it can be forced to rise further up into the atmosphere, maybe not such a bad thing for that air over a scalding hot parking lot.

As the air starts to rise, it actually begins to cool. And as air cools, it can hold less moisture. As it keeps rising further and further from that hot parking lot, it will eventually cool to what’s called the saturation point, which is the temperature at which a pocket of air can’t hold any more moisture, or the point that it gets... wait for it...saturated. In the atmosphere, that’s where the base of clouds begins to form.

Now I know you are thinking, I thought you were talking about the LCL? Well, these two terms are very closely connected.

The saturation point for a specific pocket of air, such as the air over the parking lot from earlier, is reached at a certain level in the atmosphere. That level: the Lifting Condensation Level.

That is where the term lifting condensation level comes from. Air lifts to a certain level in the atmosphere where you can start to see condensation in the form of the base of the cloud.

To bring it full circle, this is why clouds seem to be at all different levels. It is because they are. Saturation points and LCLs not only vary by region, but by city and even by point, depending on how moist and warm the air is.

And that is what makes fog cool. It happens when that saturation point is at the ground. In other words, the LCL is at ground level.

Our atmosphere is extremely dynamic, so even two columns of air right next to each other can have different temperatures and humidities, which means you can have two air columns right next to each other that have different LCLs.

What I love about clouds is that they are a visual representation of how dynamic, dramatic and interesting our atmosphere is.

I hope this was helpful and clear.