Clouds

The Royal Meteorological Society is hosting an event that will celebrate clouds. We will explore their beauty and importance to us, look at the history behind the naming of the clouds, how artists grapple with capturing their grandeur and what clouds can tell us about future weather conditions. We will also be announcing the winner of the 2019 Weather Photographer of the Year competition, with clouds being the focal point of many of the images shortlisted. So join us for a day with our head in the clouds!

By Robert Austin

I live near Darlington in NE England in the UK, an area which experiences a wide variety of weather conditions! So, an appropriate location for paintings of skies.

A recent study by NASA scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and University of Toronto indicates that updrafts are more important than previously thought in determining whether clouds produce drizzle rather than larger-sized raindrops. Such findings will help improve the accuracy of model predictions of rainfall, a challenge for both short-term weather forecasting and longer-term climate projections.

Rounded, smooth, globular ‘pouches’ clumped together and hanging underneath the base of a cumulonimbus cloud. They often form on the underside of an anvil and are accompanied by thunderstorms. The name translates to mamma and means ‘mammary cloud’.

One of the 10 characteristic cloud types (or cloud genera) recognised by the International Cloud Atlas. Its name comes from altum (height) and stratus (spread out). It appears as a greyish or bluish sheet of cloud, partly or totally covering the sky, but with parts sufficiently thin to at least vaguely reveal the sun.

Clouds aren’t typically associated with ice lollies, but rather sunshine – until now. Researchers from Manchester University have found ice lolly-shaped icicles in cloud systems over the UK and the North Atlantic.

The ice formations – which are the shape of a stick attached to a large spherical head – were found in large concentrations during a research flight over the northeast Atlantic Ocean in 2016, and previously in southwest UK in 2009.

 “What do you think a cloud feels like?” I asked the assembled Brownies

“Cotton wool, cotton candy, fluffy, cool, wet ….”

A simple garden pond decoration that produces mist by forcing water through a very fine mesh, combined with a large shallow bowl of water, creates a cloud for children to feel. Most of them end up slightly disappointed as a cloud feels like nothing very much, but it is a good conversation starter!

At 1039 GMT on 7 December 1972 Jack Schmitt from the crew of Apollo 17 took one of the most iconic, and certainly most reproduced photographs of all time.  NASA named it photograph AS17-148-22727, but very shortly after the picture went public it became known as ‘the blue marble’.  It is of course the picture of the near full-earth disk taken on route to the moon, with the sun directly behind the Apollo 17 spacecraft.  Interestingly it was not the first of these kinds of images from of earth.

Clouds have always been a feature of paintings and photographs, but images captured by amateur photographers confirmed the existence of a dramatic cloud form with a roughened, wave-like base. Citizen science has now helped experts to explain how the newly-recognised ‘wave-like’ asperitas cloud is formed.