Welcome to another Stories From The Stores
I'm joined today by curator Alex Rose
and she's telling us about Britain's obsession with the weather or at least clouds
What's going on Alex?
People have long been fascinated with the clouds
but clouds have long been a problem for scientists because they're so transient.
By the time you've described one it's kind of changed into something else.
So they always felt like they were beyond scientific description.
I mean is there really any scientific description needed, because you've got three:
big, small, dinosaur!
Yeah that pretty much sums it up
but there was a man working in the early 19th century who wanted to give more
scientific names to the clouds and so he came up with a classification system
that divided them into three main families. He gave them Latin names though.
He called them Cirrus which is the Latin word for curl of hair
Stratus which means layer
and Cumulus which means heap or pile.
In order to capture the sky that he was looking at and help his own understanding
he made lots and lots of sketches and watercolors of the sky and the cloud structures
and that was what helped him to see patterns in what he was looking at and to come up
with his classification system.
So are these sort of specific forms of clouds here?
Yeah that's right, so here we've mostly got a cumulus cloud
so the heap or pile, and there's also some Cirrus and Stratus up in the sky.
This one is a kind of hybrid version. Howard also wanted to describe how clouds changed
how they join together and split apart, so this is a Cumulostratus cloud.
So you say it's science but this looks more like art, why did he draw these?
It was to help him understand his own observations.
Because the clouds kept changing so he needed to find a way of recording them and
comparing things he'd seen from day to day.
On these he worked with another artist who filled in the landscapes
but art works like these are essential for
him communicating his ideas to the wider scientific world.
Okay so he's classified the clouds from these drawings but why do we care?
It's a good question.
So when Howard was working, meteorology was still a really young science
and it was still very much about gathering as much data as you possibly could
in as many observations as you could
and kind of hoping that patterns would appear from those observations
But Howard's scheme allowed us to start to view the clouds in a scientific way.
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