Clouds
by Cynthia Owen Philip

I have always been fascinated by clouds. One of my favorite childhood memories was repairing to our high-screened veranda with a huge bowl of freshly popped white Rhode Island corn to watch the immense storm-bearing cumulus clouds roll in from Narragansett Bay. Homespun drama with glorious sound effects provided by wind, slicing rain and exciting thunder and lightning. Better than the movies. Non-threatening, too, because the popcorn I was happily crunching with my family, was the same shape in miniature as the steadily advancing clouds.

Of course, I did not know such clouds were called cumulus at that time. (Nor did I make the connection with the popcorn!) But later, when I was living in tropical Malaysia, I felt the same thrill when the monsoon brought immense cumuli down its mountainous ridge to unload such dense downpours that, should you be driving, it was absolutely necessary to stop and wait it out. Lucky for me that I came to the Hudson River Valley, where the cloud formation is gorgeous and infinitely various. For instance, recently I had an urge to drive home to my house in Rhinecliff via the road on the escarpment overlooking the railroad tracks and was greeted by a luminous, shifting, and thickening mist slowly enveloping the river. So compelling was it that I got out of my car and stood agape. Other walkers and drivers had the same reaction. The little group stayed there in silent awe until it mysteriously thinned and disappeared down river.

All this time, whiIe I never ceased marveling at the clouds, I did nothing to find out the slightest thing about them. The sensory pleasure was enough. The other day, for no reason at all, I decided that instead of using such terms as wispy, fluffy, and ominous (along with inadequate color schemes), I should try to learn their proper names. What an adventure it has been!

Being old fashioned, I looked up books about clouds. That opened the floodgates; you can’t imagine how many scribblers put the word “cloud” in their titles. They range from Aristophanes’ vaudevillian comedy entitled The Clouds, performed in 423 B.C. but as much fun today, to the endless lists of gothic romances and probings of the human psyche. There is even one about an English estate built by a moneyed artistic couple in 1886. Called Clouds, the property ended up as a treatment center for drug addicts and alcoholics in the post World War II era. (Sound familiar?)

Instead, probably attracted by the odd use of the word invention, I chose The Invention of Clouds by Richard Hamblyn. Essentially, it is the biography of a confident, but unimposing young English pharmacist, Luke Howard, who opened the door to the scientific study of clouds by naming them. Surprisingly this was not until March 1802, although from time immemorial religions, myths, folklore, poetry and plays have been filled with cloud imagery. Having closely observed the panoply of clouds from his rooftop space in the London chemical factory where he worked, Howard realized that, infinitely various as their shapes might be, every one of them was composed of three essential forms, each created at a different altitude. The proliferation of shape was due to the three forms’ continual melding and separating, caused by changes of air temperature, the amount of water vapor, and wind currents. So that the names he gave the three would remain immune to careless translation into native languages and therefore useful tools for further investigation, he chose Latin, the lingua franca of scientific classification. He also chose names descriptive of their shapes, so that amateurs could easily remember their characteristics.

The form cirrus, Latin for curled strands of hair, originates in the upper atmosphere; cumulus, Latin for dense heaps, in the mid-atmosphere; and stratus, Latin for layer or horizontal sheet, in the lower atmosphere. The constant hybrids, or “intermediate modifications” as he called them, were named simply by joining together the names of the three forms: cirro-stratus, cirro-cumulus, cumulo-stratus. However, he awarded a special distinction to the rain, snow, and hail cloud he called nimbus that combined all three forms. Howard would be tickled pink that his nomenclature is still used today.

Howard presented his findings, illustrated by his own watercolors, at a six o’clock lecture under the aupices of a small Dissenters scientific society in early December 1802. The locus was the first floor laboratory of the chemical factory in which he worked. A surprisingly large group of scientists and interested townsfolk turned up, for word had gotten around that the 30-year-old amateur might have something unusual to say. Moreover, it was convenient, for many had intended to go on to the more elite Royal Society lecture at Somerset House that concluded with a splendid multi-course dinner. They never got there. Within a few minutes of Howard’s exposition they knew they were witnessing an historic scientific breakthrough and they stayed on and on excitedly discussing the implications of his work with him and with each other. Immediately Howard became renowned throughout Europe, for this was an era in which for all walks of life, not to pay attention to scientific investigation was not to be fully living. Still unassuming, Luke Howard did not stop refining and expanding his work until his death at the age of 92.

Moreover, the sudden rise of meteorology, as the discipline was called, penetrated the 19th century artistic world. The poets Coleridge and Wordsworth as well as Keats, Byron and Shelley, who were seeking a new and exact vocabulary that would link of human sentiments with the natural world, adopted Howard’s cloud names along with the landscapists’ already popular terms, sublime and picturesque. The painter Constable’s stunning landscapes are, in part, a result of applying Howard’s work to his own. The German polymath Goethe was an ardent devotee. When the science of clouds eventually worked its way into the American consciousness in the 1830s, it inspired the romantic school of painting, especially strong in our Hudson River Valley. Allston, Vanderlyn and Trumbull, who would have been exposed to the movement abroad, were harbingers. Cole, Doughty, Cropsey and Bierstadt avidly distinguished all the niceties of clouds formation. Church’s magnificent views from Olana, which are more skyscapes than landscapes, speak for themselves. They knew, as did the scientists, that constantly moving and mutating, clouds remained nature’s most evanescent phenomena.

Fast forward to today. We are still plumbing the mystery of clouds. NASA has vastly extended our knowledge of clouds with the latest technologies and instruments. But basically they are adhering to Howard’s nomenclature and findings. Since I’m a beginner, I tapped “NASA clouds” into the Internet and, from among the myriad projects I was offered, chose NASA Ceres. (Ceres is the acronym for Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System, but I liked it because Ceres was the Roman goddess of agriculture and, of course, human fertility.) From its programs I chose S’cool and got a fine, illustrated cloud chart. Emboldened by that result, I took a fling with Strange Clouds, which turned out to be a four-page NASA Science News Report about wispy electric-blue “noctilucent” clouds hovering on the high edge of the stratosphere that are now under observation by the International Space Station. They can also be seen from earth, although not nearly as well. I was so intrigued I pressed the button that will send me a weekly five-minute space-out called Express Science News.

Finally, I went to NASA Nebula. Mon dieu, it was about Cloud Computing. I had never thought of those two words together. Moreover, it printed out to an incomprehensible 20 pages. Wikipedia’s explanation was almost as long and confusing. Thankfully, from two computer whiz neighbors I gleaned that its most important aspects were that it: stores all your data, files, photographs, and documents; makes them accessible from any electronic device with a browser; and allows you to share and work on your materials with colleagues. Not bad. However, apparently it takes an expert to teach you how to make the most of it. Someday when it’s simplified and I know I will “use it not lose it,” I might well plunge in. Right now I am one with the character that appeared in the cartoon caption contest of the New Yorker while I was writing this piece. It is of a harried businessman strapped to a rapidly descending parachute with a phone at his ear, a computer in his lap and a brief case disgorging a plume of papers. The winning caption reads: “I have to say, I’m not a big fan of cloud computing.” For the time being, I am perfectly happy to keep my head in Mother Nature’s still mysterious clouds.