06/08/2021 Tuesday’s Cloud

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• • June 8, 2021 at 6:57 pm #489703
    Howard Brown

    Participant

    From the Cloud a Day Archive (at the foot of this forum page), US date format i.e. today. Classified as Cirrocumulus homomutatus by CAS i.e. genus but no species.

    https://us11.campaign-archive.com/?u=3b978e064761964547808bac4&id=5fd3758905

    1) After 10 minutes contrails are classified as Cirrus homogenitus
    https://cloudatlas.wmo.int/en/aircraft-condensation-trails.html
    https://cloudatlas.wmo.int/en/homogenitus.html

    2) Over a period of time such trails can transform and are then classified accordingly
    https://cloudatlas.wmo.int/en/homomutatus.html

    So my question is, given that in 2) a species is permissible would not
    Cirrocumulus floccus homomutatus
    be a more fulsome and appropriate classification?

  • June 8, 2021 at 8:09 pm #489709
    Daniel Mehta

    Participant

    Yep – I would also definitely refer to this Cirrocumulus floccus homomutatus. :)

  • June 10, 2021 at 6:21 pm #490049
    Gavin Pretor-Pinney

    Keymaster

    Thanks for this, Hygge.

    Is your problem that we didn’t include a species in the cloud classification of that Cloud-a-Day? We classified it as ‘Cirrocumulus homomutatus’, and you’re saying you’d like to have seen us classify it as ‘Cirrocumulus floccus homomutatus’?

    We often don’t include in the Cloud-a-Days all the possible species, varieties, accessory clouds, supplementary features and mother-cloud terms that could be applied to the clouds featured. To include every classification would in our opinion make the text off-putting to a lot of CAS members. It would often result in three or four Latin terms for every time we classified the cloud.

    Instead, we consciously introduce readers only to the terms that are most pertinent to the main focus of the Cloud-a-Day. We aim also as much as possible to explain terms as we introduce them. Remember, the Cloud-a-Days need to work not just for people who’ve been members for many years but also, equally importantly, for anyone who’s just joined and is reading a Cloud-a-Day for the first time. The later group of members might be only vaguely aware there even are cloud classifications – perhaps only having a distant memory of hearing about ‘Cumulus’ at school. We don’t want to inundate them with Latin terms, particularly without explanation.

    In the case of this Cloud-a-Day, the homomutatus classification is central to the idea of the piece but ‘floccus’ would not really have added much in the way of helpful explanation – in fact, it might have added confusion unless we took an aside to explain what the term referred to, thereby breaking the flow.

    Sorry that you are, once again, unhappy with the Cloud-a-Day, Hygge. We do our best, but it never seems to be good enough for you!

    Thanks,
    Gavin

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