The sky provides the greatest free show on Earth according to veteran
American meteorologist John Day, alias Cloudman. Check out his ethereal website
at www.cloudman.com, where in addition to ogling some gorgeous cloudy skyscapes,
you can find out about Luke Howard, Britain鈥檚 first meteorologist who gave
clouds their Latin names almost 200 years ago. Many textbooks relegate Howard to
the occasional footnote and, as far as Netropolitan knows, Cloudman is the best
source on this king of the cumulus outside the library of Britain鈥檚
Meteorological Office. So let鈥檚 hear it for the Net as a historical source.
Cloudman also offers a cloud atlas, cloud reports from Donna, an inmate in
a women鈥檚 prison in California, and even a meteorological analysis of Shelley鈥檚
poem, The Cloud. Some of the science behind the many forms of clouds
can be found at Plymouth State College鈥檚 鈥渃loud boutique鈥�,
http://vortex.plymouth.edu/cloud.html. There are even more stunning weather photos from
Gordon Richardson of Cape Town at http://gordonr.simplenet.com/index.htm, where
he has 600 snaps on show. He has saved some of the images in the right size for
you to use them as 鈥渨allpaper鈥� for your computer.
Then there are weird clouds. See if you can spot Jabba the Hut with
Princess Leia in the cloud formations at
www.consciousness.com/1thumbnail.html.
Alan Stanley keeps a menagerie of clouds that look like animals at
http://homepages.enterprise.net/alans.
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NASA鈥檚 International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project
(http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov) has for the past 18 years been investigating how
clouds influence global warming. Their space shuttle crews have bagged a good
set of cloud images, which can be found at www.etsimo.uniovi.es/solar/portug/cloud1.htm.
They include several mysterious configurations
(see The Last Word, 15 January)
such as the ripples above Oman dubbed 鈥渃loud lanes鈥�. Perhaps Luke
Howard would have come up with a better name鈥�
