What are clouds?
Clouds are visible masses of condense water vapor that form when air rises and cools. Difference cloud shapes occur because of air convection and instability (when hot air is under cold air). Watch the video below to learn a little bit more about how clouds form!
Why are clouds important to study?
Clouds play an important role in the climate of our atmosphere and earth! This is because clouds reflect incoming solar radiation, and absorb and re-emit terrestrial radiation. The occurrence and composition of clouds depends on local temperature, humidity and meteorological conditions as well as aerosol content. Currently, cloud and aerosol interactions make up the most uncertainty in current climate models (Boucher 2013). Different cloud types matter for climate because they interact with solar and terrestrial radiation differently.
How does human activity affect cloud?
Anthropogenic emissions affect cloud regimes. One of the easiest cloud formations to recognize are contrails from airplanes (Burkhardt 2011). These are thin ice clouds formed by the aerosols in the exhaust and possibly also the different temperature of the exhaust. Ships have similar cloud formations associated with their paths. Clouds are also effected by aerosols from other types of emissions and biomass burning, although this can either increase cloud mass or dissipate a cloud depending on the location of the aerosols (Tosca et at.). Since clouds can be natural as well as anthropogenic, they can be thought of as a hybrid object. They are an entanglement of nature and culture and exist across a variety of scales from an small isolated cloud to giant cloud regimes over the ocean. they can be incorporated into models at many different scales as well. Since clouds do matter for our climate systems, there is currently a big movement to study them as well as aerosols. However, before we knew they had a big impact on climate, humans studied the clouds to learn about the weather and make short-term predictions. Meteorology used to be quite different because it required its participants to be inside their field of study.
How are clouds classified?
The framework for how we study clouds was developed by Luke Howard, an English meteorologist, who applied the Linnaean classification to clouds forms. In his work, Essay on the Modification of Clouds, first published in 1803, Howard stresses that the path to knowing more about clouds is through direct observation. He warns the “young student of meteorology … against limiting his conceptions of the Modifications to the particular forms here represented; A correct comprehension of the subject is only to be obtained by a habitual observation of nature” (Howard viii). (Of course, I find this ironic given that I am staring at photographs of the clouds 1,000 miles away.) He thought that the mariner and husbandman, whose labor depended on the weather, was more successful than the philosopher (and his instruments) at recognized clouds and their significance. Since his classification system was modeled after the Linnaean system and in Latin, it was more universally appealing than other classification systems. Connects to ideas of standardization of measurements.
WORKS CITED
Bernstein, Andrew. 2013. “Weathering Fuji: Marriage, Meteorology, and the Meiji Bodyscape”. In Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power, edited by IAN JARED MILLER, JULIA ADENEY THOMAS, and BRETT L. WALKER, 152–74. University of Hawai’i Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wqhb3.12.