You’ve heard of Cloud
Nine – but what about
clouds one through 10?
Looking to the heavens,
weather presenter and
meteorologist Nate Byrne
handcuffs thunder, throws
lightning in jail, and even
comes up with an entirely
new word for “fog”.
Head in the
clouds
WHEN YOU LOOK UPat the sky and spot an
interesting cloud, you may see a bunny, a
hippo or a cake chasing a lollypop. When
meteorologists see a cloud, it’s hard for
them to do anything other than try to figure
out how to classify it.
We all appreciate the importance of
classification when it comes to animals- it helps us figure out relationships,
relatedness and where creatures fit in the
complex ecological web. Classification
provides a similar function for clouds, but it
can also tell us about what we might expect
on the ground – either from that specific
cloud, or from a synoptic system that
helped to generate it.
Echoing the techniques used by our
biologist cousins, meteorologists have
organised clouds into genera, species and
varieties. Unlike the animal kingdom,
though, clouds can move between types,
they can grow extra features or lose them,
and two different people looking at the
exact same cloud from different vantage
points can have wildly different ideas about
SEAN HARSANT / EYE EM what they are seeing.
WEATHERZEITGEIST
Issue 86 COSMOS – 99