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Sunday 11 May 2014

Cloud

The International Cloud Atlas is a cloud atlas first published in 1896 and remaining in print since then. The first edition featured color plates of color photographs, then still a very new technology, yet was noted for being inexpensive.

The 2017 edition of the International Cloud Atlas added 12 new cloud formations in the first update to the official cloud classification scheme since 1986. They included the Volutus, more widely known as roll clouds. These are a relatively rare low, horizontal, tube-shaped, and relatively rare type of cloud formation influenced by wind shear.  The atlas was released for World Meteorological Day on March 23, 2017.

Volutus cloud in Punta del Este, Maldonado, Uruguay,By Daniela Mirner Eberl 

The World Meteorological Organization adds twelve new cloud types (including volutus, pictured) to the International Cloud Atlas, the first update to the official cloud classification scheme since 1986.

Lieutenant Colonel William Henry Rankin was the only known person to survive a fall from the top of a cumulonimbus thunderstorm cloud. He was flying an F-8 Crusader jet fighter on July 26, 1959 when the engine failed, forcing him to eject and parachute into the cumulonimbus cloud. He suffered from frostbite, welts, bruises, and severe decompression as a result of the 40 minute fall.

Lumpy lobes of mammatus clouds sometimes attach to the bottom of other clouds. True to their ominous appearance, mammatus clouds are often harbingers of a coming storm or other extreme weather system.

The prefix 'nimbus' in a cloud name means the cloud produces precipitation.

One cumulonimbus cloud (storm cloud) can hold enough water for 500,000 baths and can be twice the height of Mount Everest.

Noctilucent clouds are the highest clouds in Earth's atmosphere, being bright polar mesospheric clouds illuminated by the Arctic sun from below the horizon, between latitudes of 50° and 70°. They are composed of water ice crystals up to 100 nm across, forming most frequently in the northern summer at altitudes of 76 to 85 kilometers (47 to 53 miles).

The water droplets in a medium-sized cumulus cloud, the ones that look like cotton wool on a sunny day, weigh as much as 80 elephants.


Cloud Nine was originally the ‘cumulonimbus’, listed as type number nine in the International Cloud Atlas of 1896. Reaching heights of 45,000ft, it is also the fluffiest and most comfortable looking of the clouds.

A cloud in the constellation Aquila has enough alcohol in it to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer.

There is a water vapor cloud in space which has 100 trillion times the amount of water present on Earth.

The average cumulus cloud weighs about 1.1 million pounds, which is the same as 100 elephants.

To make one raindrop of water, it takes approximately a million cloud droplets.

A thunderhead cloud formation can have more mass than 10,000 jumbo jets.

Nephophobia is the fear of clouds.

Source Daily Mail
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