The underappreciated wonder of clouds – and where to find the most beautiful on Earth

Why do we travel? To see landscapes and culture. To eat and drink new things. To feel the heat, or cold. To see new horizons, to dwell under a different sky. 

Think about your best holiday photographs. Depending on your eye and talents, anything from a third to two thirds of most pictures features sky – and it’s the clouds that add most interest, filter the light, tell the viewer that you are in a land of monsoons, mellow sunshine, wintry drama or dramatic storms. 

We can all read – if we so choose – the architecture, history, recipes and guidebooks of our travel destinations. But can you, and do you, read the clouds?

Cloudspotting took off in the Noughties, especially among hipsters and urban “chaps” who had come across the writings of Gavin Pretor-Pinney. His Cloud Appreciation Society claims 47,000 members in 120 countries, and charges £29.50 for a badge and a natty cloud identification wheel; you can get a half-decent key free from the Met Office website. Cloudspotters helped get the newest named formation, the wavy asperitas, into the august International Cloud Atlas. 

The naming of clouds is great fun, but for me, it’s the blurriness, the constantly morphing and disappearing edges and the seeming formlessness that makes clouds magical. That, and their violent potency, often belied by their appearance. High wispy clouds look like ideal stuffing for a pillow, but they can signal very cold temperatures up in the higher atmosphere. Towering anvil-shaped cumulus clouds have a divine appearance, but steer a small plane into one and you can be sure of hellish jolts and those desperate engine screams that sound like unwonted descent. An average cumulus cloud weights about the same as an Airbus A380: 400,000kg. That’s a lot of fluff!

As for joining a society, that’s fine for social animals, but I think clouds, like birds, trains, planes, car registration plates and most other spottable things, are best enjoyed alone – when the imagination is free to soar. My favourite lyric about a cloud is Brecht’s ‘Memory of Maria A’, which tells of a man who cannot remember the face of a lover he once had and can only remember the encounter and kissing her thanks to a beautiful cloud. Ephemeral, incorporeal, soul-less, the cloud will be forever remembered. You can read about the song here and hear a version sung by David Bowie no less.

Nephology is the study of clouds, specifically. But just as people talk about a psychogeography of places, I wonder if there should not exist a “psychometeorology” of weathers – in which case, clouds are rather special in that we have some that repeat on us – from home, places we love – and others we recall from travels, even though in both cases the clouds are no longer I existence. I realised, after half a lifetime of skyward glances, that there’s a certain formation that speaks intimately to me. It’s when the bottom of greyish clouds rift, ragged, against a brighter horizon. I always thought of them as fraying, and wondered if these threads were rain that had given up. The Met Office’s uses the technical term “virga” for the formations – from the Latin for “streak” or “rod”. Virga are known as “jellyfish clouds' because of their puffy tops and tentacular streaky stingers hanging below.

Why do virga matter to me? I suspect it’s because I saw a lot of them – subconsciously, peripherally – growing up in the usually cloudy northwest of England. The skies of the Lancashire/Cheshire borders are not especially dramatic, though they can be gloomily grey and turn quite rainy. But what they do have is a routine moodiness, a grumpy changeability – the weather of dashed hopes, cancelled outings. Those virga, hanging like spectres or wraiths, were always there, threatening, menacing, having a laugh at my sun-dependent plans.

Like most British residents, I’ve had to travel to see clouds that thrilled me. Over the Argentinian pampas I saw terrifying cumulonimbus, stretching from just above the water-pump windmills to the upper limit of the stratosphere, their bellies roiling and dynamic.

Above Patagonia you get the most astonishing UFO-like lenticular clouds, calm and serene looking but strangely affecting at dawn when you’re camping beside a glacier. Crossing the Atlantic I have seen from plane windows – close enough but at a safe distance – supercells made up of huge, bubbling clouds lit up by lightning storms that have turned the world green or yellow. The Intertropical Convergence Zone is known to mariners as the doldrums; up in a flying ship it is pure dynamite. Want to be terrified by clouds? Read about the ones that gathered around Air France flight 447 on a fateful day in June 2009.

In Kamchatka I saw clouds hugging volcanic craters and other clouds so low that our chopper had to hug the forest crown as it searched for a landing site. In Arizona the clouds went even lower, snaking to the floor of the canyons. In the Andes clouds become a cloak of warm misty or icy fog; what fun it is to ride on a bus at night on gravel roads adorned with switchbacks. In Antarctica I saw no clouds and then I saw only cloud – fierce, angry, spiky clouds, spewing out wind and hail.

“If you know you’re cloud types, you can cloud-spot anywhere,” says BBC weather presenter Emily Wood. “They are essentially the same the world over, just a lot bigger in places like America. If you want to spot a supercell, basically a rotating thunderstorm, the Great Plains in the United States in the place to go – you won’t spot one of those on the same scale here in the UK, thankfully. The humble cumulus, the standard fluffy cloud on a fair day, can sometimes be overlooked, but it gives us out best chance of seeing shapes in the sky; a row of sheep or dragon are the things my children often spot.

“We get our share of cool cloud phenomena here too, such as a sun dog or parhelion that forms when the sun is at a certain point in the sky and sunlight is refracted by ice crystals, from high cirrus clouds, in the atmosphere and you get bright patches of light either side of the sun. Nacreous clouds have also been seen in British skies, when polar air is displaced and temporarily hovers over the UK and very high clouds in the sky reflect sunlight from below and become iridescent. Scotland is probably your best bet for those. 

“The ultimate for me though is the Kelvin-Helmholtz wave cloud, formed when there is a strong vertical shear between two air streams, when the winds blow faster at the upper level than the lower level. These are often seen by the Rocky Mountains and have recently been spotted in New Zealand – and apparently can be seen on Saturn and Jupiter.”

Then you fly home to the UK, from the Rockies or Saturn, and you see… what?

“Overcast” is a word surely without precise translation. It is the quintessential British sky. A result of widespread, low-level stratus clouds, it’s the formation – though that is to add interest where is not due – which often welcomes British holidaymakers back from sunnier climes. When you see that grey and uneventful blanket, you can clip you seatbelt in and get ready for Gatwick, Manchester or Leeds airport. For the next days, weeks, months, you will probably not see any sun at all.

Yet, going back to my new field of science – psychometeorology (perhaps I need a Society?) – even overcast has its place. Think of classic British Unesco World Heritage Sites, places like Ironbridge, Stonehenge or the Giant’s Causeway. Overcast kills contrast, deadens the light and makes your experience – and photographs – of these icons all the more memorable. In fact, next time I visit one of these, I may only snap the cloud and, after Brecht, I’m sure the whole moment of encounter will come flooding back again.