Cloud thoughts
31 May 2022
I’ve been trying to learn more about the weather for a while now. It all started when I decided I really wanted to understand what the different types of clouds were. I knew what cumulus, stratus, and cirrus were like, but the finer distinctions of height were lost on me.
The book “The Cloudspotter’s Guide” proved invaluable to me. It had photographs of different clouds, ways to tell them apart, the science behind their formation, and even a cultural history. I was surprised such a book existed, for it seemed nobody even cared about clouds. I was happy to see how many people were as in love with clouds as I was.
Have you ever heard of “the sublime”? If you haven’t, then I recommend watching this short, jargon-free video and then coming back here. Ready? Clouds are sublime.
Seriously! Look at them. No, really, look at them. Glancing your eyes in a direction is not enough to look. Pretend you’ve never seen one before. Alternatively, pretend you’ll never see one again, as God is about to Thanos-snap clouds out of existence. Pay attention, real attention.
These things are enormous. They hover over our planet, lazily, these masses of water droplets. The mighty cumulus looks like heaps of cotton candy, or delicate flotillas. Straightforward stratus paints our skies different shades of gray, like a veil connecting us to another reality. And cirrus, the most playful of them all, twirls and trails in the upper troposphere. Unlike cumulus and stratus, made of suspended water droplets, cirrus is made of ice, and the farthest away of them all. When you see a cirrus cloud, you are seeing something that forms “4,000 to 20,000 m (13,000 to 66,000 ft) above sea level.”
I was driving to a friend’s house the other day, and was awestruck by an enormous, tubular stratocumulus roiling through the sky. Imagine if a snake that size were hovering in the air. Utter chaos. But it’s just water droplets, it’s just clouds, and so the sheer size of this monstrosity is relegated to a background fact.
You’ll never experience the sublime if you treat the sky like a glorified screensaver.