“The difficulty with clouds is that you can’t see into them, so you have to find ways of looking into their three-dimensional structure, such as with radar systems,” Briggs said.
Advances in research are followed closely by cloud enthusiasts who spend their leisure time looking out for unusual varieties and learning about their effect on the planet.
“We believe that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them,” says the Cloud Appreciation Society, a club for spotters, on its Web site, where it regularly posts a “cloud of the month.”
The wispy high cirrus, the ominous cumulonimbus and the fluffy cumulus have all held the title and have been the subject of heated debate in Internet chat forums.
Thousands of people capture unusual or striking clouds on camera and share them online.
“High cirrus thickened up to put on a strange show over Phoenix this evening,” US cloud spotter Mike Lerch wrote on an online chat forum before posting dramatic shots of the spidery high clouds in the skies above Arizona.
Enthusiasts are keen to challenge negative attitudes to clouds, which have spawned sayings such as “a dark cloud on the horizon” and “even the darkest cloud has a silver lining.”
“I thought it was about time someone stood up for the clouds because too many people complain about them,” said Gavin Pretor Pinney, author of The Cloudspotter’s Guide. “They are rather chaotic things, difficult to predict, difficult to fully understand, but the facts are emerging that they play a crucial and essential role in regulating and affecting the temperatures on the planet.”
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