With your head in the clouds
Richard Webber, as he discovers more about the man who named them
A CONSTANT pageant gliding across our skies, clouds are nothing more than ephemeral patches of water droplets or ice crystals. Yet their influence on many aspects of life, past and present, is indubitable and millions of us around the globe are entranced by these transient, evocative aspects of Nature.
Such is the British Isles’s location, predominant winds rush in from the Atlantic Ocean, resulting in clouds being regular visitors to our shores. However, we’re not alone: in fact, NASA’s Earth Observatory estimates that about 67% of our planet’s surface is covered in cloud most of the time.
The classification of clouds, which introduced such poetic names as cumulus and cirrus, has existed for more than 200 years. We have an amateur meteorologist to thank for dreaming it up. In doing so, he
