A bit of cloud science

Hello, cloud lovers.

It's an interesting feature of how our brains work that sometimes we require language to extend our appreciation of some natural phenomenon. For example, before I joined the scout troop at Tiffin Boys School, clouds were just, well, clouds to me. But then - in order to gain some badge or other - I learnt about cirrus and cumulus clouds, and the various combinations and variants thereof. Suddenly I could talk about clouds with specification and authority.

And I love the science of clouds. I particularly like those fluffy characters with flat bottoms, as if they have been pressed down onto some glass ceiling a few hundred feet up in the air above us. That glass ceiling is actually the exact height at which the warm, dense air reaches the dew point where it can't hold water as vapour any longer and it becomes liquid, and that is what we see as clouds.

For no particular reason, I've been wanting to write about this for a while and, today, as I was driving back along the M65 from a meeting with a client to the Minx's house, I saw loads of these flat bottomed clouds. And that was really frustrating as there was nowhere that I could pull over safely to photograph them.

I was moaning about this as soon as I walked through the door and the Minx - entirely characteristically - suggested that we head straight back out to find a place from which we could photograph them. Thus we had a nice drive out out, chasing the particular clouds that I wanted, just so that I could take this photograph.