The Cloudspotter's Guide
You may think you know all about clouds and what they mean for flying, but you should not miss this book: it gives a whole new take on the subject. Furthermore, it’s a joy to read and a delight to own: that beautiful cover, in the style of the Brian Batsford books of the 1920’s (now collectors’ items), conceals an elegant metallic pinstripe binding and it is altogether such an attractive object that you can tell your children it will probably one day be a valuable heirloom. Every chapter is adorned with an original woodcut, and every one of the cloud photographs in the full colour centre section would have been a Cross Country Readers’ Clouds winner. Those photographs were provided by members of the ‘Cloud Appreciation Society’ (check it out at www.cloudappreciationsociety.org), which all readers of XC mag should seriously consider joining. This, by the way, is quite a neat method of getting a book off the ground: you start a specialinterest society. Not only do you have a guaranteed audience but they probably do the bulk of the work for you (remember Stephen Pile’s bestselling ‘Heroic Failures’, the ‘official handbook’ of the ‘Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain?’).
This is a book for enthusiasts and connoisseurs, but it will also open the subject of cloud appreciation to a wider audience. There have been other sideways looks at the weather: most recently ‘Defining the Wind’ by Scott Huler, which is a wonderfully discursive work about the creation of the Beaufort Scale. But not since C.R.Benstead’s ‘The Weather Eye’, subtitled ‘An Irreverent Discourse upon Meteorological Lore, Ancient and Modern, with Many Indiscreet References to the Art of Forecasting as now Practised’ (written ‘at sea in His Majesty’s aircraft carriers Courageous and Furious after the outbreak of war in1939’) has there been anything as amusing and wide-ranging. The chapter on ‘The Morning Glory – the cloud that glider pilots surf’ is alone worth the price of the book (it is surprisingly cheap at £12.99). The author visited Burketown in the gulf of Carpenteria, northeastern Australia, to study the phenomenon, in the course of writing an article for the Daily Telegraph Saturday magazine. Cross Country published an article on hang-gliders soaring the Morning Glory in February/March 1996, but this gives a much fuller picture. Pretor-Pinney actually has photographs of the fridges in the Burketown pub misting up in classic fashion, predicting the arrival of one of these amazing clouds.
To give an idea of the range of this entertaining work, you find him on one page analysing lenticular clouds in Piero della Francesca’s fifteenth century masterpiece The Legend of the True Cross and on another comparing what Pliny the Elder and the Sanskrit philosopher Varahamihira have to say about earthquake-predicting clouds – the modern expert being a Chinese chemist living in New York. In case that all sounds a trifle erudite, he is full of childish glee at the daft shapes you can spot in clouds if you have enough imagination – he has examples from Bob Marley to the Abominable Snowman. What practical use is the book? I did find it helped me sort out for instance the difference between cirrocumulus, the ‘mackerel sky’ and altocumulus – which he calls a ‘carp sky’.
It’s enormously valuable in honing your cloud recognition skills. Perhaps you will learn more about weather and how to fly from books like Dennis Pagen’s ‘Understanding the Sky’, and more about meteorology from Derek Piggott’s ‘Understanding Flying Weather’ but for sheer fun and entertainment, and something to read while you sit on the hill waiting for conditions to come right, this one is too good to pass by.
Stephen Winkworth, October 2006
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