Is it possible to create an enclosed manmade weather system? There are plenty of experiments, usually geared toward kids, that involve "making a cloud in a bottle" or something similar.  These exercises are neat for what they are, but pale in comparison to the beauty of real clouds.  Really you're just making fog in a bottle.

Using currently available (preferably consumer grade) technology, is it possible to create real clouds?  Or even better, a real weather system?  Imagine you have an enclosed 10 ft wide cube.  If you build a landscape inside, complete with mountains and bodies of water, and you have complete control over the boundary conditions of the cube (temperature, airflow in/out, etc.), can you reproduce the beauty of a towering cumulus cloud inside the cube? One step further... can you create thunderstorms?

I have a very rudimentary understanding of how weather works, but the engineer in me says in theory this should be possible.  But in reality a lot of small details glare out at me as possible show stoppers.  Aerodynamics does not scale, because of the constant size of air molecules at all scales.  I suspect this limitation may affect my weather system puzzle as well.  Also with respect to thunderstorms, I suspect the 10 ft wide cube may not be able to mimic the role of planetary grounding, atmosphere, etc., in the creation of electric discharges.
Real clouds are beautiful because they are huge and you observe them from far away, thereby gaining the ability to see a distinct "boundary" and, therefore, shape. But if you ever travel through a cloud in a plane, thereby seeing one close up, you'll find that they really are "just fog". You'd struggle to recreate a scale cloud in a tiny environment; water molecules have a reasonably consistent size and you can't just downscale the entire system.

Similarly, you could probably create a thunderstorm but at that scale it would be over so fast you'd barely see it. An obvious example is the movement of water droplets as steam leaves your kettle and condenses. You just see a quick whoosh of vapour particles spiralling about and, well, that's about as close to a rainstorm as you'll get.

Some phenomena, such as air vortices, can manifest at smaller scales &mdash; I've seen more than a few mini-tornados forming in my garden dragging leaves around in a funnel fashion &mdash; but I'm not sure you'd ever be able to contain enough energy to see that happen for more than a fraction of a second in a small tube.