Cloud Types

This is a good link.  There are undoubtedly dozens of others.  This one looks and feels right.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/clouds

Back in the day I was wont to while away the mornings at the Weather Station on Moen, Chuuk, especially during the daily baloon launches.  These launches were coordinated throughout the Pacific, in a project of tne Weather Service.  I remember seeing the word "teleconnections," referring to interactions between atmosphere and ocean.  I'm, sure El Nino came into play.  And a device in a small protective closet (like those around the weather instruments at airports---this weather station was at the Chuuk Airport) that pumped air through a cannister for later analysis to detect isotope signatures from radiation blown around the Earth from Chernobyl, as I believe I recall.

And at this weather station I found a book, among several fascinating books, published by the UK Meteorological Office, an atlas of cloud types.  This was an amazingly unique and beautiful book, bound in plastic covers---so as to be water resistant---with extremely high quality photographs, and remarkably beautiful and apt photographs of each type of cloud.  The best I have seen.  I have searched over the years, and found nothing to equal it.

The observers at the Chuuk Weather Station took cloud observations, I think, hourly. 

I am not surprized then that the Meteorological Office would have a web site of this nature.

This is one for the list of links.  Every young man or young woman, of any age, would do well to have a gander at this site.

Fe asked "what is cloud nine?"  Here's what I found out from the Wiktionary:

Popular etymology references the 1896 edition of the International Cloud Atlas which defined ten types of cloud. The book defined the ninth cloud as the cumulonimbus, which rises to 10 km (6.2 miles), the highest a cloud can be. No conclusive evidence, however, confirms this origin.

This web site, the catalog of clouds, identifies Cumulonimbus as a low level cloud.  ?????

Another page on the same site references the cloud spotting guide:



Source: metoffice.gov.uk

On the same site may be found a link to a pdf of Cloud Types for Observers.  Could this be a later iteration of the same book I saw in the Chuuk Observatory?

[This  post bears no connection with the film or recent novel Cloud Atlas, which, nevertheless I would like to see.]