It was a gray morning as I set out to work today. The whole week has been like that, gray and cloud covered till the sun finally burns the cloud cover by afternoon. It is great weather to go running with Maya. No sunscreen, no shades. She can enjoy the scenery unhindered by the shades. But this gray weather in summer is a little gloomy. The temperatures have hovered in the low sixties to low seventies too. As I stared at the clouds and surfed the web as the company shuttle made its way to the campus, I was drawn to an article titled “Iowa woman’s photo sparks push for new cloud type”. It was accompanied by a beautiful photograph of rather unusual looking clouds.

Jane Wiggins had stood by her office window watching these clouds form. An amateur photographer, she snapped this picture. She said, “It looked like Armageddon. The shadows of the clouds, the lights and the darks, and the greenish-yellow backdrop. They seemed to change.”

No new cloud type has been discovered since 1951. Searching for a better picture than the one in the AP review, I ran across a forum that carried some impressive looking cloud photos. One of the posts also carried a good description of cloud types. A poster called hypewaders wrote: “The basic cloud forms have been defined for centuries, and these are some common characterizations: flat, lumpy, rainy, lumpy-rainy, curly, and high. To standardize (and sound more impressive) it’s common to use latin words for these descriptors: Stratus, cumulus, nimbus, cumulonimbus, cirrus, and alto, respectively. There are various compound words made up of these descriptors, like “cumulonimbus” (lumpy raining cloud) for example. Some less common cloud types haven’t ever gotten latin names- for example, roll clouds, which are tubular indicators of rather violent rotors.”

On that forum, I also read about an unusual, annual cloud formation called Morning Glory in a remote corner of Australia thata attracts glider pilots for the unbeatable gliding experience that it provides. Here is a picture of Morning Glory from the Wikipedia and a story to go with it on Cloud Appreciation Society’s webpage.

Reading all this made my morning commute so much more intense. The gray clouds no longer looked gray and dull and undifferentiated. The shades of white that peppered the clouds of gray, the muted colors of the marsh by Baylands Park added beauty to what was otherwise a mundane weekday commute.

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