Cloud Appreciation Society

Damayanthi Ponnuthurai has written a new story, “Ida the Cloud”.  It’s a wonderful book for children with the description telling us “Ida the Cloud introduces readers to Ida, a dreamy cumulus cloud whose head is quite literally in the clouds. Thoughtful, curious, and full of ideas, Ida sees no separation between humans, animals and plants – everything is part of the ...

A microburst is when a Cumulonimbus storm cloud releases its precipitation in a shaft that is intense and very localised. It can lead to an outflow of winds up to 100 mph (160 km/h) and tends to have a diameter of less than 2.5 miles (4 km), lasting around five or ten minutes.  

Julie Kramer (Member 59,280) saw this microburst containing snow unleashed...

Stephen Ingram (Member 7,328) was driving to his track club workout in Long Valley, Eastern Sierra Nevada, California, US when he looked to the east, across the White Mountains. ‘I almost drove off the road,’ he said, ‘when I saw these dramatic crepuscular rays.’

Crepuscular rays are beams of light and shade that can appear to radiate from the Sun as the shadow...

Guo Wei, Member 57,319, sent us a poem that he wrote after seeing dozens of large horseshoe vortex formations develop one after the other over Xiamen, China.  He has kindly translated it into English for us and sent a photograph he took of the sky that day.

Miracle

This textile fragment showing a pattern of dragons and clouds was woven in Japan during the Edo period, sometime in the eighteenth to nineteenth century. The fragment was likely once part of a luxurious silk garment, such as a _kosode _robe, a Noh theatre costume, or even a Buddhist altar cloth. Today’s cloudspotters might think of the curling, or breaking-wave, cloud ...