Who hasn’t looked at a cloud and imagined they saw a giant, a face, a … ?

Today is World Meteorological Day, the brainchild of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and this year’s theme is ‘Understanding Clouds’. The WMO has a great website that not only explains the importance of clouds in weather forecasting and in driving the entire climate system but also has free downloadable resources to aid in cloud identification. Or, if you’d rather have a book with ‘hundreds of images of clouds, including a few newly classified cloud types’, plus ‘other meteorological phenomena such as rainbows, halos, snow devils and hailstones’ then 23 March also marks the launch of the latest edition of the International Cloud Atlas, which ‘has now been produced in a digital format and is accessible via both computers and mobile devices’.

I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn I’m a big fan of clouds and, though I’m utterly hopeless at naming them – yet another subject I need to study, I do have rather a lot of cloud photos. The sequence below covers a period of about 18 months, from my time living in an apartment in Auckland, New Zealand, where I had the most wonderful views.

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