Do you ever get the feeling you look at the world differently from your friends?
So, how was your holiday?
I have never seen such piercing blue skies.
Not a cloud in the sky, not one. It was blue, every single... I'll show you my photos!
Every single photo is just blue, it's just amazing!
Am I the only person who prefers clouds to blue skies?
When I was a kid and my family went on holiday,
I'd sit by the window of the plane so I could look out at the clouds.
I wanted to jump,
see if I could land on one of them.
All kids love clouds. So why is it when we're older, we seem to spend
all our holiday time and money trying to get away from them?
I'd be happy if I never saw a cloud again, frankly.
When they're not being ignored, they're the topic of complaint.
Clouds are pretty much viewed as a nuisance, blocking out the sun and blue sky.
They ruin our chances of sunburn and melanomas.
Clouds are the central theme for every doom and gloom metaphor.
We talk about you having a cloud hanging over you.
And there's nothing worse than there being a cloud on the horizon.
We're always trying to chase the clouds away.
And someone who's lost touch with the world
has his head in the clouds.
The list goes on and on.
My name's Gavin Pretor-Pinney,
and I see it as my self-appointed duty to change this sorry state of affairs.
I want to challenge the delusion that the only good sky is a blue sky.
I think it would be dull.
I think life would be dull, if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day after day.
And that's why I started
the Cloud Appreciation Society,
to fight back against blue-sky thinking.
In this programme, I want to take you on a journey of discovery.
I hope to convince you that cloudspotting is without doubt
one of the most pleasurable and life-affirming pastimes.
Along the way, I'll not only show you my top five clouds
and how they work...
..but also, I'll try to prove the existence of a new type of cloud
that I discovered when cloudspotters from round the world started to send me some amazing pictures.
But getting a cloud officially recognised by meteorologists
is something that hasn't been done for over half a century.
So it's not gonna be easy
because this cloud so elusive and rare.
In fact, I like to think of it as the Yeti of cloudspotting.
It's the ten miles of atmosphere directly over our heads
that's the stage for one of the greatest shows on Earth.
Suspended over two thirds of our planet's surface is an epic cast of infinitely varying forms,
playing against the backdrop of night and day, 24/7, for over four billion years.
Scaling higher than the tallest buildings, greater than
all the oceans, more powerful than the mightiest volcanoes,
clouds give our skies spectacle and drama.
Clouds reveal the movement of air within the atmosphere.
They're the bearers of fertility and nourishment,
as well as the agents of terror and destruction.
As the ever-present backdrop to our existence,
clouds have played a cameo role throughout the entire history of religion, art and culture.
I'm not a scientist or a meteorologist or anything like that.
I'm just someone who likes clouds.
And I write about them, I give talks about them - I stand up for them.
I started the Cloud Appreciation Society as a bit of a joke.
I didn't think there'd be enough people who felt the same way.
But surprisingly, I wasn't the sole member of my society for long.
Now, we've got this amazing network of members all across the world.
From Finland to French Polynesia, from India to Iraq.
And you know what? They're all just linked by one thing -
a love of the sky.
My name is Harry Reid.
I'm member number 8,000 of the Cloud Appreciation Society.
SHE SPEAKS SPANISH
I'm in the Cloud Appreciation Society.
Hi! I'm Susan Thompsongate...
HE SPEAKS FINNISH
There's nothing better to just go and look at the clouds.
HE SPEAKS GERMAN
I'm Azhy Chato Hasan, the president of the Amateur Astronomers' Association of Kurdistan.
And member number 1,687 in the Cloud Appreciation Society.
But what does it really mean to be a cloudspotter?
I'm a member of the Cloud Appreciation Society because I just plain appreciate clouds.
Not all members do it from the ground.
Like Achille and Marta, cloudspotting on their way to Senegal.
For me, watching the clouds is an endlessly carefree and uplifting activity.
And it's also something that can be enjoyed anywhere with a view of the sky.
To some, this is just a kind of overcast day, it's a grey day, a cloudy day.
But to me,
I think it's a beautiful sky.
And there's so much to see and read and enjoy in it.
Right up here around the sun,
there's just a fantastic changing mottled effect.
You've got this cumulus cloud blowing over in front of the sun, its crisp edges
evaporating away and becoming more fibrous and broken.
And the light of the sun being filtered through different layers of cloud as they pass in front of it.
And the overall cloud having a mottled effect.
Look at all the different shades.
Up here, you've got just a whole range of fantastic...
It's like an abstract painting.
And as random and whimsical as clouds might seem, identifying them is beautifully simple,
because there are only three basic shapes to clouds.
Cumulus - these are the puffy clouds with flat bottoms that build up in heaps.
Stratus, the huge, featureless, horizontal sheets of cloud.
And cirrus, named after the Latin for "curl", and it's easy to see why.
Their streaked appearance gives them the look of wavy hair.
And though no two clouds are ever the same, they largely fall in to one or more of these categories.
Each has its own style and character.
Some form as low down as sea level, others right up to the beginnings of space.
And these cloud types remain pretty consistent throughout the world.
Whether it's Florida...
Or Iceland.
Probably the most recognisable and best known of all the clouds is first up on my list -
the cumulus.
Dense and well defined, this low-level cloud is such a familiar feature of sunny afternoons
that it's referred to as the fair-weather cloud.
Ideal for kids drawings and weather map graphics.
It's a design classic.
Beautiful, crisp, white,
cauliflower mounds.
The cumulus cloud is the most light-hearted of all the cloud types.
And it's the best one for finding shapes in.
Its flat bottom and rotund top make it the cutest in the sky.
But beware. This humble little cloud can easily turn into a feisty one.
If the air around is unstable, it can grow from the middle,
rising up in towers to become the biggest in its class.
The cumulus congestus.
If this happens before midday, there's a chance of
a heavy shower in the afternoon - giving rise to the saying,
"In the morning, mountains, in the afternoon, fountains."
Cumulus clouds can be found everywhere except the poles, where it's too cold for them to form.
You can't be a cloudspotter and not love the cumulus.
And the clue to how these beautiful cumulus clouds form
comes from the fact they appear on a sunny day.
Because it's the sun, warming the ground and causing
thermals of air to lift off from it that give rise to cumulus clouds.
It's a little bit like
in a lava lamp.
In the base of the lamp, a light bulb heats this oil that's mixed in with the water.
And as the bulb at the bottom of the lamp warms the oil, the oil expands a little bit, becomes
a little bit less dense than the water and starts to float languidly up through the lamp.
Although these are liquids, it's not a million miles away from what happens outside on a sunny day.
Because it's the sun, warming the ground and causing thermals of air
to lift off from it that give rise to cumulus clouds.
The sun warms the ground and some parts of the ground heat the air more efficiently than others.
So, a ploughed field will warm the air above it more quickly than a bit of woodland.
And that part of the warm field warms the air above it,
which begins to rise in a bubble, just like the oil in a lamp.
And as it rises, it expands.
And as it expands, it cools...
Until it's cool enough for some of the moisture
in that rising pocket of air to appear as tiny water droplets.
And that's when a cumulus forms.
Like a giant ice cream, sitting on an invisible cone of rising air.
The cumulus is the cloud of choice for 11-year-old Emily Bell, member number 2,042.
My favourite clouds are cumulus clouds.
They have this kind of happy feel about them and never make you feel sad.
Some look like things.
In this picture, I see a baby elephant.
I think that's an elephant poking his head over the mountain.
This one looks like a flying elephant.
And this one looks like an elephant just about to blow his trunk.
This is another elephant.
This one I thought looked like a baby duck.
But Dad thought it looked a bit like an elephant.
Now, look. What can you see?
What sort of clouds can you see now?
What are these? Do you know?
I'm encouraging my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Flora,
to share my interest in cloudspotting.
Now, what we can see here, Floss, what we can see here is, up there...
Can you see, right up there?
Right up there. What are those ones?
Those wispy wispies?
What are those called?
Cirrus. Cirrus, that's right.
And what about these big, clumpy, fluffy ones, here?
One way or another, clouds figure in our earliest memories.
Perhaps it's because, as babies lying on our backs, being pushed around in prams and buggies,
we spend so much time gazing up at them.
My earliest memory of clouds is staring out the window of my parent's car.
I thought that men climbed up on giant ladders to harvest cotton wool so fine as to be weightless.
Much later on, to my bitter disappointment, I discovered they were made of something else.
Water.
The stuff responsible for all life on the planet.
More specifically, clouds are made from water that's
evaporated from the planet's surface by the heat of the sun.
In fact, the equivalent of over six times the Mediterranean Ocean is up in our atmosphere at any one time.
A thought that would be a bit worrying for the fairytale character
Chicken Licken, whose story revolved around his fear of the sky falling down.
Maybe he did have a point.
After all, it's curious how something so massive can seem to defy gravity.
Here's Professor John Thornes, who's kindly offered to shed light on this worrying thought.
One of the amazing things about clouds is that they're so heavy.
The water, at the sort of height and temperature that we can see them in the sky,
is actually 1,000 times heavier than the air.
Therefore, a typical cumulus cloud weighs several thousand tonnes.
Therefore, in the old days, scientists couldn't understand
why the cloud didn't just plummet from the sky and fall on your head.
But in reality, the cloud is falling, but very, very slowly at what we call the terminal velocity.
There's a balance of forces between gravity
pulling those water droplets down and the resistance, the friction of the air molecules acting against that.
And so the cloud is falling, but only at a few centimetres a second.
So it does look as though it's stationary in the sky, but it's not at all.
But only a part of the moisture in the atmosphere is in the form of clouds.
Most of it is water vapour, which is invisible.
It's why you can have clear skies on of the muggiest of days.
And, as my kettle demonstrates, clouds form when some of that
invisible water vapour condenses into the tiny water droplets that we can see.
And how this happens isn't as obvious as you might think.
The answer lies in dirty air, that has dust and impurities in it.
It can be anything from smoke and pollution, to salt particles blown up from the surface of the sea.
I've heard that there's not only a way of demonstrating
that clouds need these particles to form, but also a way of creating a cloud in a bottle.
Right, OK. Here it is.
How to make a cloud in a bottle.
Ingredients. You need one clear plastic bottle.
Take off the label. I don't want to have that in the way of the cloud.
I don't know if this is gonna work. I'm going to give it a go.
You need some water and you need some matches.
You never know, we might be able to make a cumulonimbus.
It says here, "Adult supervision required."
There we go.
The perfect cloud chamber.
You start by placing just enough warm water in the bottle to cover the base of it.
Then you want to introduce a bit of smoke.
So you light a match, let it burn for a few seconds and blow it out.
And then, there's that smoke.
The important ingredient.
Just put the lid on quickly, before it escapes.
Then you need to do the bottle squeezing part.
That involves
six or seven brisk squeezes.
I'm gonna squeeze it, as it suggested. Clear...
And this it says, apparently, is enough to make a cloud appear within the bottle.
I think
I need a dark background.
Wait a second.
OK. So, how this is supposed to work is that you create...
..an area of saturated air, with a lot of moisture in it within the bottle.
And the smoke particles are there to provide little nuclei on to which
this moisture, this invisible water vapour in the bottle can condense into droplets. That is definitely...
That is a cloud.
Each time you squeeze it,
the air with in the bottle warms slightly.
And each time you release the pressure,
the air expands and it cools.
And it's that moment, when it expands and it cools that
some of the moisture, can condense on these particles of smoke into little droplets.
And that is how... At least that's what it says here, that is how you make a cloud in a bottle.
Isn't that amazing? Wait a second, you can see some colours.
That's iridescence. As the light shines through, it's deflected by
the particles of that cloud and it's caused the iridescent colours.
You sometimes see that in a cloud in the sky,
around the edges, as the sunlight comes through.
It can cause a kind of beautiful pastel rainbow colours.
My cloud in a bottle has even made iridescence. That's beautiful.
Hello. My name is Klaus Nuchtern.
I am a journalist from Austria and I am a member of
the Cloud Appreciation Society.
Which I can prove, here is my certificate.
Number 30,220, that's me.
Why am I a cloudspotter?
Well, actually, I guess everybody is.
I confess to being one,
which is not such a difficult thing to do.
The second of my clouds is stratocumulus.
Bold, dramatic and endlessly entertaining,
stratocumulus is a low cloud layer made up of clumps and patches.
It often forms when a layer of warmer air above
causes cumulus clouds to spread sideways and join up.
They're probably the best ones to look out from an aeroplane.
Flying over them, you can see the turrets rising up from a stratocumulus cloud.
And it looks like some magical city in the sky.
The ancient Greeks even had a name for this vaporous landscape - nephelococcygia.
Or, in English, cloud-cuckoo-land.
And if the air beneath the stratocumulus layer is hazy enough, then the results can be spectacular,
if not divine.
The sunlight bursting through the gaps creates a light effect
sometimes referred to as The Fingers Of God.
Or, as the meteorologists say,
crepuscular rays.
And when there's a low sun, the shadows and the colours across the top of a stratocumulus cloud
can be some of the most beautiful in the sky.
And no-one loved the stratocumulus more than the artist
who, to my mind, was the greatest ever cloud painter -
John Constable.
He painted this cloud study in the 1820s when meteorology was in its infancy.
Yet, Constable's understanding of a cloud's form and movement was astounding.
There's that cliche of Inuits have 40 different words for snow.
Well, I think constable has many more than that, tones of grey, which
he uses to depict the beautiful way that the light is filtered and
scattered by clouds like this.
This is a stratocumulus sky.
It's one of his cloud studies.
It's one of the clear examples where Constable is a true cloudspotter and a true connoisseur of the sky.
But I'm sad to say, not all artists had
the same passion for understanding clouds as Constable did.
Take this painting.
At first glance you might think the artist knew their cirrus from their stratus.
So, John Brett.
Cloudspotter or not, is the question.
First thing I like about it is that he's got these crepuscular rays, these rays of light that shine down
on account of the shadows from the clouds.
And they are a beautiful thing to see in the sky.
I'm really pleased that John Brett has put those in his paintings.
The other thing I like about it is
the way the light plays on the surface of the sea.
That's clearly John Brett's main...
It's the thing that's got him most excited in this painting.
The thing that makes me think that perhaps he's not a true connoisseur of clouds is
the fact that, above
and below this horizon line, right down the middle of the painting, they don't seem to match each other.
Because these spots of light,
these torch beams of sunlight that are coming down onto the sea surface
wouldn't appear with those sorts of clouds.
I mean, those are cumulus clouds, cumulus humilis.
Little cumulus clouds.
Maybe a bit of stratocumulus further in the distance.
But these sort of spots of light occur when you have a genuinely covered sky.
A sky covered with clouds, stratocumulus clouds, perhaps, with holes in them.
The holes allow the sunlight to shine down in these
dramatic shaft of light, which strike the sea in that way.
So he's just got the sky from one day and the sea from another day and stuck them together.
So, you know, a cloudspotter but not a cloud connoisseur.
This is more like it.
Another Constable.
Right, so this one's The Opening Of Waterloo Bridge.
You can see all the pomp and circumstance of that event.
But, of course, it's totally irrelevant here.
What's important is what Constable is doing in the sky, as ever.
The first thing that struck me about this one, that I found quite pleasing and another reason why
Constable is a great cloud lover, is what he's done with the crepuscular rays here.
At first glance, you might think he's got it wrong.
You might think that Constable, the great cloud painter, had made a mistake.
Because these crepuscular rays
seem to kind of converge, like that, down to a point.
As opposed to what you normally see, which is crepuscular rays
coming out, spreading like the fingers of a hand.
And yet, when you look at where the sun is in this painting, up in the top left,
you can see that the sun is kind of behind you, as you look at the painting.
And so, as these rays converge off to the horizon, the perspective
means they would actually converge to a point on the horizon.
So they're actually what's known as anti-crepuscular rays.
It's when the sun is coming down and the rays, the shadows and the shafts of light from the clouds,
are converging as they go off towards the horizon.
So, this was before meteorologists had even given these anti-crepuscular rays a name.
It's before they'd categorised them.
And Constable, just by his pure genius of observing the sky with meticulous care,
was able to spot them before meteorologists even gave them a name.
Yeah, this is the one.
This is Jan Siberechts.
The reason I wanted to find this one is because
it's an example, a good example, of someone getting the sky wrong.
I mean, when is it? 1690. So you can't give him too much of a hard time.
But he's depicting a double rainbow here.
When you have a double rainbow, it's something you see in the sky
quite a lot, but the inner bow is the brighter one.
The outer bow is the dimmer.
The secondary bow is the outer bow.
So he's got his double rainbow the wrong way round. A classic mistake.
Clearly, not a cloudspotter or a cloud connoisseur.
Sorry, Jan Siberechts.
To study the weather,
you must need to know about isobars and all sorts of technical things.
But to study clouds, all you need to do is to appreciate
how truly beautiful they are.
Good morning, everybody. We've got a very special visitor today, Gavin Pretor-Pinney from
the Cloud Appreciation Society has come to speak to us and help us learn a little bit more about clouds.
We're very intrigued to know how clouds are formed and the different sort of ways they might be formed.
So, perhaps you can tell us a bit more about that. Do you guys like clouds?
Yeah? Good.
Well, we will begin, in that case.
When I came to the school here, I was asked to teach geography
and I found that part of the syllabus was weather.
And I actually tweaked it so that I could
actually teach my children more about clouds.
There's so much in the clouds.
It's not just the weather, it's a lot of other things.
So clouds are the perfect way of bringing all sorts of subjects, not just the geography, into the lesson.
Elephant! Elephant! Elephant!
On a day like today,
the sun warms the ground and the ground warms the air above it.
I wasn't well as a child and I used to lie in bed and watch the clouds.
I remember being fascinated by a marvellous photo of a towering thundercloud and practising the name.
Cumulonimbus.
The name and the mood seemed to match.
Cumulonimbus!
This is my cloud number three.
It's the big one, the grandaddy.
Cumulonimbus is the most fierce and fearsome of all the clouds.
Whenever there's a cumulonimbus around, you know that it's not going to be a boring day.
Simply put, the cumulonimbus is a cloud out of control.
So it might come as a surprise that it starts life as a humble cumulus.
As it grows, massive currents of warm, moist air are drawn up its centre.
And, as this cools it condenses, releasing even more heat, causing it to build higher and higher.
While its base can be as low as 2,000 feet, it can reach up
as high as ten miles, making it the tallest of all the clouds.
These are cumulonimbus clouds. You can see how, up at the top, they're spreading out in their anvil shape.
Cumulonimbus incus, Latin for an anvil.
And you've got dark masses down at the bottom, with the base of the cloud.
It's where the precipitation is coming down
and you've got showers, sudden but heavy showers, no doubt, down below.
But, up the top, it's a much more serene affair.
The top of the cloud is glaciated.
It's spreading out in an anvil shape, unable to rise any higher
because it's reached part of the atmosphere where the temperature changes and it acts as
a sort of glass ceiling, or an invisible ceiling to the growth of the cloud.
You have the contrast. From a distance, you have the contrast between the dark, brooding base and
the light, fluffy, spreading anvil of the cumulonimbus cloud.
But, beneath its calm exterior,
lies a maelstrom.
And it's the clashing turbulence inside that generates the electrical power
that is at once terrifying and exhilarating.
It's estimated that the average cumulonimbus contains the energy of ten atom bombs.
A thundercloud is a cumulonimbus cloud which has
very high vertical extent and therefore has quite a long lifetime.
This allows the particles to grow to quite large sizes, a few millimetres
and larger, which means they're going to fall relative to other
smaller particles, which are still being carried up in the updraft.
You get collisions between two types of particles that have had different histories.
Therefore, their surface properties are different.
THUNDER ROARS
The individual particles, having separated their charges,
usually carry a positive charge to the top of the thunderstorm.
And a negative charge is carried down on the hailstones as they fall, relative to
the ice crystals which are carried up in the updraft.
Given enough of these interactions and separations, a large enough voltage develops
between the positive and negative layers for there to be a lightning discharge.
THUNDER ROARS
When a lightning stroke is occurring, there is local heating
and it heats the local environment to 30,000 degrees Celsius.
Therefore, it causes a rapid expansion.
It's this rapid expansion which is creating the noise of thunder.
If you're out hiking and you feel this tingling and your hair stands up, it probably means
there's going to be a lightning stroke near by and you should minimise your exposure to it.
But it's not just on the ground that a cumulonimbus can wreak havoc.
If you're a pilot, you're well advised to take a wide birth.
The least of your problems is the lightening taking out your electrics
or being pelted with hailstones the size of tennis balls.
Or even your wings caking over with ice, dangerously affecting the aerodynamics.
No, the real problem is with those mighty updrafts.
They can cause even the biggest aircraft to flip over like a pancake.
Few have entered the heart of a fully-developed cumulonimbus and lived to tell the tale.
It's nice, because from the airplane you fly around and nothing can happen.
You can fly around and see it from the sides.
Phwoar. It's really beautiful.
Cloudspotter Ewa Wisnierska is proud of her collection of cumulonimbus photos, all taken
from a sensible distance within the safety of a modern passenger plane.
But imagine if you looked out through one of the aircraft windows as you cruised at 30,000 feet
and you saw a woman, barely conscious, and caked in ice,
emerging from the flat top of the cumulonimbus in temperatures below minus 40 degrees Celsius.
She'd appear only briefly before being sucked back into the abyss of the thunder cloud.
Though it sounds farfetched, it's exactly what happened to champion paraglider Ewa, over the skies of
New South Wales, Australia, during a test flight for a major competition.
And it's a miracle she's still alive.
It was the 14th February 2007.
We were about 130, maybe 150 pilots.
The sky was looking really nice, blue.
But we could already see two big clouds.
And, when we passed, the clouds seemed to grow and to come together,
which made them bigger and a thunderstorm built.
Suddenly, I got very strong lift which sucked me into the cloud.
From the cloud base, Ewa found herself soaring up
into the storm at an astonishing 20 metres per second,
straight into the heart of the cumulonimbus.
It was dark, black.
So I couldn't see anything, I only could hear it.
Despite being surrounded by unimaginable surges of energy,
the temperature was rapidly dropping with altitude, one degree Celsius
for every 100 metres she went up.
As it fell below minus ten, frostbite began to set in.
Everything was cold and frozen.
I was shaking. You cannot imagine this temperature.
And, as the air got thinner, Ewa struggled to stay awake.
I was going up and
there is less oxygen in the altitude.
One moment, I just get unconscious.
Dangling unconscious from her paraglider, Ewa's instruments continued to log her flight.
A layer of ice would have covered her body, in temperatures below -40.
I woke up again,
and still in the cloud.
I didn't know, I couldn't even imagine how high I was.
For a short moment, I went out of the clouds.
Ewa was almost 10,000 meters above sea level, the cruising altitude of a jet airliner.
I was still above the cumulus.
I could see the sun for a little moment.
But then the glider entered the cloud again.
And I was, like, talking to somebody, to the angels, I don't know.
Actually, I am not religious.
But I was thinking, like, "Please. Not here. Not like this.
Hurtling back to earth at 33 metres per second,
Ewa somehow managed to regain control of her glider.
And when I saw I was coming out from the fog,
it was really incredible feeling.
I could see the earth again.
Ewa's story was a media sensation.
Rescued 60 kilometres from her launch site,
and with only frostbite to her legs and head,
it was a miracle she didn't suffer brain damage from lack of oxygen.
In total, she'd been inside the storm cloud for a staggering 90 minutes,
tossed around by the rising and falling currents
like a rag doll in a washing machine.
Later, Ewa discovered that another pilot caught in the same cloud
died from a lightning strike.
It's curious, but I still like the clouds.
Of course, I respect big clouds much more.
This is already cumulus congestus
and you can see on the top, it's going to the sides already.
And this one starts already to froze a little bit
on the edge.
So, probably, this one will grow up to a thunderstorm.
So if you see something like this, you should go to land.
Clouds came close to ending Ewa's life.
But for a certain newlywed couple, it's what brought them together.
My knowledge, my interest and fascination with clouds
really only developed when I met Richard
because he's a bit of a cloudspotting geek.
I've always call him my little geography geek.
And he took it upon himself, whether I was willing to listen or not,
to tell me about clouds, weather formations, fronts, thunderclouds.
And I just thought, "God, this guy, there's a bit of depth to him."
"He's not just about taking me for a pint of lager and some fish and chips or whatever.
"He actually wants to show me something that is important to him."
The wind certainly picked up more than from when we were sitting in our cosy little house.
But up here, we're with the elements.
The clouds are rolling in thick and fast.
There's some high-level clouds that are actually alto-stratus.
Beneath that, we've got some low-level cumulus.
When you come up here, the clouds are moving so fast over your head
that you just get totally caught up in nature.
If you look down the cliffs, you can see the clouds are forming.
So, it's a really delightful spot.
You can see where it all starts. There are clouds forming
and you can see them spiralling up to become cumulus clouds
which will shortly pass over our heads.
Well, just below the cliff is an old quarry, actually.
And it's tradition that people should create with the stones
whatever they wish.
Which is then read from above.
Some are creative and some are a little bit lewd.
SHE LAUGHS
So, yeah, we're gonna go off and have a bit of fun
creating something with our stones.
The International Cloud Atlas is...
Well, I guess it's required reading for a cloudspotter.
But it's not exactly a page-turner, put it that way.
It's the publication that sets out
the official classifications of clouds.
It's put out by the World Meteorological Organisation.
This edition is 1975 - the most recent edition.
The reason for putting together a cloud atlas
was so that meteorological observers around the world could ensure
that they were speaking about the same things
when they described the sky.
So that we knew that when someone observed
an alto-cumulus castellanus over in Sweden, they were
talking about the same thing as someone observing one over here.
Arranging, classifying and cataloguing
is something that goes back to ancient civilisations.
It's almost part of our make-up.
But it wasn't until the turn of the 19th century
that clouds were actually given names.
So why did it take so long?
Over to Dr Richard Hamblyn, member 813.
Clouds remained, up until the coming of the Scientific Revolution,
objects at a distance.
They were not really things that could be studied in any way
or things that could be grasped in any way.
They were up there as sort of challenges to philosophy.
They were the extreme manifestation of the ungraspable.
The average lifespan of a cumulus cloud in the summer
is about ten minutes.
So if you were to stand watching the sky for ten minutes,
you'd watch the birth, life and death of this tiny vaporous civilisation.
And they were confounding for scientists and philosophers
and artists alike because they never stayed still,
they changed their form. They were easier to be ignored.
So clouds remained nameless...
..until one evening in London, December 1802,
when shy pharmacist and amateur meteorologist Luke Howard
brought along an essay he'd spent years preparing
to read to a small science debating society.
His claim was very simple.
There were three main families of cloud, to which every other
cloud form was either a transitional form or a modification of.
Luke Howard's masterstroke
was to use the existing Latin system for classifying plants and animals.
So terms such as genus and species
would be familiar to scientists everywhere.
The Latin names he gave the clouds could be used in different combinations,
reflecting how clouds are never static, but always in transition.
So, for example,
a thin wispy high cirrus cloud might descend and spread out to form
a cirro-stratus and so you can see the way that he's combined
those two terms to produce a third term.
The beauty of Luke Howard's cloud classification was it allowed you
to keep track of what was happening now
and also what was just about to happen.
That gave meteorology a scientific basis. It made it a modern science.
The interest in Luke Howard's ideas was immediate and unprecedented.
Suddenly the doors were open to a scientific understanding of clouds.
The new classification of clouds also had a wider cultural impact.
It inspired the Romantic poets.
Wordsworth's, "I wandered lonely as a cloud,"
is probably the best known opening line in the English language.
In Germany, Goethe dedicated poems to Luke Howard's work.
And Shelley's masterpiece, The Cloud
had verses themed on each of his new cloud types.
And painters were able to use science
to help them express themselves more accurately.
Constable would refer to Luke Howard's booklet as he sketched and painted.
But Constable and the Romantic poets
were ultimately most fascinated by the emotional power of clouds.
Constable felt the sky was the keynote
and chief organ of sentiment.
And this painting, more than any other,
shows how he used clouds to convey his emotions -
in this case, profound sadness.
It was painted soon after his wife died in 1828.
There's a kind of bleak mood to this painting,
which is brought greatly by the sky.
You can see what he means, "the chief organ of sentiment."
A true cloudspotter and connoisseur of the skies, indeed.
As I leave the gallery, I'm met with a vast wet blanket in the sky.
And it's with a heavy heart that I present to you
the fourth of my selection of cloud types.
Because in the time it took to go round the gallery,
the cloud layer above had thickened to form a nimbostratus.
The one that gives all the other clouds a bad name.
And it rains and rains and rains.
It is a bit of a miserable cloud.
Low, grey, rainy.
And it's incessant rain -
it goes on and on and on.
And it'll give the cumulonimbus storm cloud a run for its money
because this cloud is not only very, very thick,
it spreads over hundreds of square miles
and it hangs around for ages.
I think it's good to make a distinction between
cloudspotting and cloud-appreciating.
And, up above us today, we've got a nimbostratus cloud.
And so that's spotting it,
but I wouldn't say it's really one of my favourite clouds.
In fact it is my least favourite of all the major cloud types.
It does have a very definite affect on our moods.
I think if we were to stop anyone here,
you would soon find out that this is their least favourite cloud.
This? It's just sort of nothing weather, isn't it?
No good to anyone. Does it have an effect on your mood?
Yeah, I think it's harder to be buoyant in this kind of weather.
The whole atmosphere is really dingy. It's dark.
Your mood kind of goes along with that.
It's a bit like smog, really.
It downs everyone's mood. Everyone looks really unhappy!
It sort of hangs around, a little bit like
a kind of unwanted guest at a party.
But, hey - I guess I should consider myself fortunate.
There are some cloudspotters who'd give their eye teeth
to be stood beneath a nimbostratus.
This is for the northern hemisphere.
Yeah, that'll be better.
I was born in Australia
and I didn't see a cloud till I was four-years-old
because there was a big drought.
I went outside to look at the clouds and I got hit in the forehead
by some raindrops and I fainted.
They had to throw two buckets of dust on me to bring me around.
PHONE RINGS Hang on!
What? Cumulus?
Right, in Cairns? I'll be there!
I've got to go. I'm sorry.
It's only 800 miles. I'll be there tomorrow.
It never rains, but it snows.
It's surprising to know that almost all rain in temperate climates
starts off as snow as it leaves the cloud, even in the summer.
If it's warm enough,
the snowflakes melt into raindrops as they fall to the ground.
And all it takes for the cloud to start precipitating
is a few ice crystals, which will form
when the temperature is low enough.
This, in turn, starts a chain reaction
as the crystals grow, break up and stick to other water droplets,
causing them to freeze, too.
Now supposedly there's a great way of demonstrating this,
turning a whole cloud into ice crystals, even snow -
that's if I can get it to work.
It sound simple enough, though.
All I need is a fire extinguisher, a carbon dioxide one.
Then, I'll need to wait for the right conditions,
a really cold ground level stratus, commonly known as fog.
I just need to be patient, that's all.
Right, it's foggy and it's minus three degrees,
so I figure that's got to be the perfect conditions for it.
And I've got my fire extinguisher here ready.
So I'm going to give it a go.
Let's see what happens.
I've spoken to a few meteorologists who reckon it can be done.
But I don't know anyone who's actually turned fog into snow.
Are there any signs of freezing?
I don't think that's working.
With these floodlights, I mean...
you'd be able to see if it was ice crystals rather than droplets.
And I can see that they are droplets,
and they're not ice crystals.
So it's been an unqualified failure.
Or has it?
Maybe these are sparkling slightly.
Maybe there is something a little bit twinkly about these fog particles.
I think they are.
I think they might have frozen.
It's not falling as snow but
it's certainly sparkly.
I'll see if I can get a closer look.
They're definitely sparkling like ice crystals.
They've got to be ice crystals, haven't they?
Not in my breath.
My breath is just
normally foggy.
But there's definitely the sparkle of crystals.
Beautiful.
The frozen particles of carbon dioxide I sprayed into the fog
certainly seem to have triggered the formation of ice crystals
right through the cloud.
They're not snowflakes though,
which is when the tiny ice crystals stick together.
But it's impressive all the same.
In nature, this type of fog cloud is most common in the polar regions.
And it's beautifully named diamond dust.
And now the fog's gone.
I don't think that... I think it was clearing anyway,
but all that's left is just a few sparkles up in the sky.
You can see them glinting.
I can't suppose the fog went because of doing this.
That can't be the case.
But the fog has definitely cleared and there are sparkles, crystals of ice in the sky.
So, I guess that's a success.
And it's these tiny ice crystals that also make up
my fifth and favourite of all the cloud types,
the Cirrus.
So beautiful is this cloud,
that I gave Cirrus as my daughter's middle name.
In Norse mythology
the fine threads were spun by the goddess of the atmosphere.
They're not only the highest,
but the fastest moving of the common clouds.
Up there in the atmosphere, the winds are travelling so fast.
You'd never think it,
but like the Nimbostratus, it's actually a precipitating cloud.
Those distinctive and elegant streaks are in fact
falling ice crystals.
And as those ice crystals descend,
they fall through different layers of the atmosphere.
And in each layer they can speed up or slow down, which is why
they take on this beautiful translucent streaked appearance.
But they melt and evaporate long before they reach the ground.
Be warned though -
if you see them spread and join,
it could be a sign that there'll be rain in a day or so.
My name's Louise.
I live in the Great Victoria Desert in Western Australia.
This is Carlene and Mr Grant.
We've got a lot of different clouds out here.
The old people can read the clouds.
They can see whether there's going to be rain or not.
These clouds here - what's the Pitjantjatjara word for clouds?
Ngangkali. Ngangkali. Ngangkali. Ngangkali.
That's the Pitjantjatjara word for cloud. Yeah.
What's the name of that one there?
THEY SPEAK IN PITJANTJATJARA
Yeah.
Any rain in those clouds? No.
HE SPEAKS IN PITJANTJATJARA
No rain in those clouds.
It coming. HE SPEAKS IN PITJANTJATJARA
Oh, the rain might come later. OK.
That way. Yeah.
Which way? Which way are they going?
This way.
Going south.
My cherished collection of cloud atlases
clearly shows how Luke Howard's system of cloud classification
has stood the test of time.
But since its enthusiastic reception in 1802, it's grown and evolved.
New species and varieties of cloud have been added to his original list,
particularly in the first half of the 20th century,
as meteorologists continued to observe and develop
their understanding of the atmosphere.
But for some reason,
there hasn't been a new classification of cloud since 1953.
For example, the pyrocumulus, the cloud which forms
over the rising hot air from fires, has no official classification.
Or the contrail, the lines of ice particles left behind by jet planes
flying through clear, cold and humid air.
And I'm curious as to whether now
things have stopped changing.
Do we no longer see a new cloud formation
and decide that it's one worthy of classification?
Is the book closed
on coming up with new classifications for clouds?
In 2006, I received a some photos
from a chap called Don Sanderson living in Iowa in the States.
He said, "I just thought we'd send you these weird clouds
"that we saw over our town.
"They're just not the sort of clouds we normally see here.
"We're not near to mountains."
They were very dramatic and unusual
and they got on the local news.
I thought I was going to see
alien spaceships come down through the clouds.
Some say it looked like a scene from the movie, Independence Day.
Others had more down-to-earth descriptions.
It almost reminded me of ocean waves rolling in.
I thought it looked like the nice frothy cream on a latte.
In case you missed all the excitement this morning,
these clouds were the talk of the town.
This nameless weather phenomenon drew people outdoors.
My sister rang and woke me up,
and said I had to come outside to see the clouds.
And most enjoyed Mother Nature's free entertainment.
Just making sure Independence Day wasn't happening again.
Don't worry, sci-fi fans,
meteorologists say it's not the end of the world.
The local weathermen said they weren't really sure
what this cloud would be called.
It was in the back of my mind, and then I started getting
other photographs sent in from members around the world.
These clouds seem to form when a cloud layer in very stable air,
is subjected to the kind of intense atmospheric waves
that you might find around mountainous regions.
And every now and then, one of these would jump out at me as being,
"Oh, there's another example of that weird cloud."
But then as more and more of these things have come in,
it strikes me that there's no real existing classification
that they neatly fit within.
They're a little bit like an undulatus cloud,
which means wave-like. It's from the Latin for undular - wave.
But they're less regular than you would tend to see in undulatus cloud.
And it's also a little bit, has some appearance
that's a bit like a lenticularis cloud.
Those are rather smooth and globby,
usually in the shape of a lens or an almond.
Then there's also a little bit of the mamma cloud to them
which is a particularly dramatic cloud formation
that has these pouches, after the Latin for udders.
It really kind of can be quite extraordinary, that cloud type.
And this formation has a bit of all three of those in my mind.
And I thought, well maybe...
Maybe if it doesn't fit into the existing cloud classifications,
does that mean that we just can't have a name for this cloud?
Or is there an argument to say that we should add a new classification?
And so, I've decided the best thing is to prepare my case,
to prepare the argument as to why this should be a new classification.
What I'm hoping is that I can persuade a group of meteorologists
to get together and hear my case for this as a new classification.
But I don't know, there's potential that I might stand up
in front of these learned meteorologists,
and just...well, just look like a bit of a fool!
If I get it wrong, I could look like a bit of a fool.
If they say, "What do you mean?
"That's so obviously a so-and-so cloud."
That could all be a bit embarrassing.
I've even given the new cloud a name,
asperatus, Latin for roughened-up.
I'm sending the idea to the renowned Royal Meteorological Society.
I don't know whether they'll invite me to talk further about the cloud,
but I suppose that's up to fate and the Gods.
There are a whole number of different reasons why
people might contemplate the clouds.
Perhaps because they're landscape artists or glider pilots.
But the cloudspotter I'm going to meet now, Craig Hamilton-Parker,
contemplates them for an entirely different reason.
That's because he's a cloud psychic.
Craig, hi. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too.
How are you doing? Not bad.
Good. You're doing all right too. I should know that, being a psychic!
So what is it that you do exactly with clouds?
It's called aeromancy.
Mancies are like divinations.
You can get geo-mancy, reading the earth.
I know a friend who reads dirty plates and interprets the reading from the dirty stains on the plate.
So we can read anything like that.
But I think that clouds are such a beautiful, ephemeral, effulgent sort of thing
that they just lend themselves to some form of heavenly,
spiritual type of exploration.
I mean, Elvis Presley, you know, I believe he looked at the clouds
and actually foresaw his own death,
he saw some horrible picture in the clouds and got quite upset about it.
I'm keen for Craig to read my fortune.
How does it work then, practically, if we're gonna do this?
Are you asking me to see shapes, or are you seeing shapes?
If I can see... I'll have a look at the clouds that we've got around.
We've got some of those, I guess they're cumulus clouds.
Some of the pictures, I kind of feel they're like motherly faces,
they look like happy mum looks to them,
so could I say that you're a person that has always been,
through your life, very close to Mum?
Er... I suppose so, yes.
And I would say very protective to anything connected with family.
Talking of family, we're going to, we've got another child on the way.
Oh, right, so that's... Are you getting a boy, or a girl feel?
You've got two already? I've got one already, I've got a girl.
I've got a feeling it's going to be another girl.
Really? And another question I had, do you do this in terms of questions?
Yes, you can do, because obviously, what you can do is,
you can say a question and of course, my unconscious will project it.
It's a way of connecting to the intuitive unconscious...
I'm thinking of, er, presenting
to some eminent meteorologists
that we should come up with a new categorisation of cloud.
There's a type of cloud which looks like you're underwater, and you've got the waves of the surface
of the water that you're looking up at, and there's no Latin or other name
for this type of cloud.
But I might be laughed out of the room before we can get there. No, it's worth putting this forward.
You've seen a hole in the clouds, as it were, that needs patching up!
But before you can say "James Randi,"
Craig spots a cloud that seems to sum it all up.
I see a sort of like
a Mickey Mouse sort of laughing sort of face.
Right, yeah, yeah.
That face looks like it's someone being mocked,
and I think you have a fear of people not taking you seriously. Ah.
Erm, you've walked into the academic world and they look at you as, "Who's this guy?"
You know? And you've got to get over this fear of
people not taking you seriously.
You've got to just be a lot more upfront about what you do.
You're as big an expert as anybody else.
That's the way you've got to storm the world and take the future by hand.
That's what the clouds are saying to us.
Say what you believe in and don't worry about what
the academics keep saying, that it should be this or that.
So the clouds are saying, "Be bold with your love of clouds?" "Be bold with your love of clouds," yes.
THEY LAUGH
"Be bold with my love of clouds."
I like that.
And whether or not you believe that the clouds can be
the messengers of one's fortune, at the end of the day, it's just another way of appreciating them.
Another way to be inspired by the sky.
Hello, my name is John Pena, I'm 27 years old and
I currently live in Colombia, in South America.
And so I thought I would begin by showing a video I made of me racing a cloud.
And so I was really interested in this idea of competing with
something that not only has no idea we're competing, but that has no reason to ever compete with a human.
In a world where there's so much division,
it's refreshing to be reminded that these are some things we share in common,
genetically ingrained into our bodies, into our retina, this blue sky, the landscape and clouds.
Well, guess what?
I've been invited by the Royal Meteorological Society to give a talk to a panel of experts
about my proposal for a new classification of cloud.
I'm a bit nervous, actually.
The Royal Meteorological Society is one of
the most respected meteorological societies in the world.
And I've come with my little portfolio of members' photographs of this type of cloud, to present
to a panel of meteorologists and persuade them that it should be a new classification.
There's not a cloud in the sky today, which I'm hoping's not a bad sign.
I'm feeling like a bit, as I say, a bit nervous and I hope I'm not going to make a fool of myself.
Mr Pretor-Pinney? Yes. Professor Hardaker will see you now.
Great, thank you. Would you like to come upstairs? OK.
Er, so I thought... Let me just explain what this is about, maybe.
I, er, you know I've got the Cloud Appreciation Society, and people
send in photographs from all around the world of clouds that they like.
I noticed... I noticed a few years ago, there were
one or two cloud types that I was having some difficulty classifying.
..that were like that were these ones, erm, from Cedar Rapids, in Iowa, in the States.
I was looking at it and I was thinking, "What type of cloud is this?" Here's another one.
A very kind of choppy, mixed
way in which the undulations are appearing.
Do we know the dates that they were taken, Gary?
Yes, they seem to be mid-to-late summer. OK.
And then I saw some from New Zealand...
Gosh, that's pretty dramatic.
I know.
It's one that, you know, exists at different levels and I would have said
it would be a variety that would exist at strato-cumulus and alto-cumulus levels.
I'd like to see some independent corroboration of the pictures from two observers' standpoints, you know?
I've got this photograph from several different people sending it in.
And then these ones in New Zealand that were sent in by two independent people, looking very, very similar.
At a similar time of day and they both... So you've got independent corroboration?
I've got two independent people photographing that.
And many independent people photographing that one.
I would like to see a bit more information about when and where the pictures were taken, so
that we can start to study the meteorological situation, and to get an idea of what's happening
in the atmosphere to create some of these spectacular clouds.
I'd like to see more evidence of the synoptic situation
so that's what the set-up of the atmosphere was like at that particular time.
Was it warm, was it cold?
I think it's certainly worth an opportunity to see if we can take this forward.
There seems to be something, there seems to be something there.
The World Meteorological Organisation is the place to go
for new classifications to be recognised.
If we're going to make a case, we're going to have to put a bit more about the meteorology,
the weather conditions that were happening when these pictures were taken, which we can help you with.
Together, we've got the basis of a case that we can take forward, and we'd be happy to help.
Let's push it forward and see if we can just nudge open that gate of
the World Meteorological Organisation, and let's see how they respond.
I don't think that could have gone better. That was... That was great.
They were very, very positive about the whole idea of a new variety of cloud, and so I'm going to get
some details together and we can take it forward, by the sounds of it.
Today, the Royal Meteorological Society, tomorrow, the World...
Meteorological Organisation.
But before I get too carried away, it's important to remind myself what it means to be a cloudspotter.
It's something that doesn't need a big fanfare.
It's about stopping
and taking a breather from whatever it is you're doing and looking up.
It's an important part of my everyday life, because having
my head in the clouds, ironically, is a grounding experience.
Hi, my name is Donna Levinstone. I am an artist living in New York City.
I painted this drawing using pastels. It's called September 11th, 2001.
Rather than a portrait of the twin towers, it's really a very emotional piece that represents the cloud,
which really became more of a peaceful resting place for thousands of people that vanished on 9/11.
It was a natural thing for me to do this drawing,
because clouds were something that have been a very important part of my work for 20 years.
And unfortunately, even though this was the result of such a disaster,
I actually found some beauty in the cloud that really provided a peaceful home for these people.
We can make the clouds our friends and our ambassadors of love,
peace and friendship,
because they pass as nations, they pass as oceans,
they pass as continents, without any borders.
So we can make the clouds our best, best friends.
The manifesto of the Cloud Appreciation Society
asks you to, "Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds."
A philosophy inspired by Shelley's poem, The Cloud.
"I am the daughter of Earth and water and the nursling of the sky
"I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores
"I change but I cannot die
"For after the rain when with never a stain
"The pavilion of heaven is bare
"And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
"Build up the blue dome of air
"I silently laugh at my own cenotaph and out of the caverns of rain
"Like a child from the womb
"Like a ghost from the tomb
"I arise and unbuild it again."
# And when it rain it would all turn...
# They were beautiful
# The most beautiful skies as a matter of fact
# The sunsets were purple and red and yellow
# And on fire and the clouds would catch the colours everywhere
# That's...
# It's neat because I used to look at them all the time
# You don't see that - big clouds little fluffy clouds
# Lil-lil-lil-lil-lil-lil-lil-lil-lil
# Little fluffy clouds... #