Thursday 30 March 2017

cloud atlas

For the first time in three decades the World Meteorological Organisation, Kottke informs, has added several new formal classifications for cloud formations—called species, and their supplementary features. The gallery of images is quite striking and worth perusing. First published in 1896, these compendia were important training tools for predicting the weather and developing a standard nomenclature to communicate forecasts without always having the pictorial key at hand, much like the complex and exacting language of vexillology.