On the Difficulty of Identifying Clouds

First published April 22nd 2012

I have just come in from taking a few pictures of the sky, after a short and sudden hailstorm. Recently, I have been discussing with a friend, the names and identities of clouds. The spring season is on us, April is delivering the anticipated showery days, and the time seems propitious to nail down some of this esoteric wisdom.

Here is a view looking north from our house.

Cumulonimbus - or possibly Cumulostratus

And here is the opposing southerly view, a few minutes later

Cumulus threatening to be Cumulonimbus

I am reminded once again of how tricky it is to pin down these esoteric names. I have studied the guide ( here it is from the Met Office), and have looked at similar photos of clouds on their website: but I still find it a puzzle to commit between Cumulus, and the lower-level Cumulonimbus. And getting the distinction between Cumulonimbus and Cumulostratus is also a challenge.

In my “northerly” view above, I think I’d  go for Cumulostratus, given that there are no distinctive white cotton-wool edges anywhere … or are there just a few hints of them in there?

In my “southerly” view, we see only the top half of some very fluffy Cumulus – but behind the trees, wno knows what Nimbus awaits?

The philosoper Heraclitus of Ephesus (540-480 BC) teaches that all things are in flux or change. This for him was the case, in spite of what empirical evidence might indicate at times. Nothing is permanent, but everything is constantly becoming something else or going out of existence.
It doesn’t rain much in Ephesus, but I think he must have seen a few clouds in his time.

Met Office guide to cloud types and pronunciations

Source: metoffice.gov.uk

Geological Time and Cigarette Papers

 Yesterday (one of those sunny September afternoons in clear light on shimmering flat sea and no breeze), Clare and I went  on a  Geology tour at West Runton beach  (Norfolk, twixt Sheringham and Cromer). It was led by a former curator of Cromer Museum, who was part of the group which discovered the Steppe Mammonth on this beach in the early 1990s.

He was excellent at explaining  the classification of Geological time since the Big Bang. He used the location to do so

We were standing on the concrete mooring platform at West Runton. From this mooring, our guide pointed to  Cromer Pier in the distance, some 2.5  miles away. His illustration went like this:

Cromer Pier from West Runton Beach

Imagine, he said, a timeline where the start is Cromer Pier representing the Big Bang, the start of our Universe. Then he pointed to a half centimetre crack at the edge of the concrete mooring upon which we were standing. At  some point in this crack, he said, would have occurred the latter stages of Pleistocene Epoch in the Cenozoic Era,  2.5 million – 12,000 years ago. The Holocene, our current Epoch in the Cenozoic Era, and the end of the timeline, would have been a fag-paper’s width within this crack....

Twelve thousand years and a fag-paper's width. A momentary perspective on our sense of what's important, our place in the scheme of things