Slashdot Mirror
'New' Clouds Earn Atlas Recognition (bbc.com)
Twelve "new" types of cloud -- including the rare, wave-like asperitas cloud -- have been recognized for the first time by the International Cloud Atlas. From a report: The atlas, which dates back to the 19th Century, is the global reference book for observing and identifying clouds. Last revised in 1987, its new fully-digital edition includes the asperitas after campaigns by citizen scientists. Other new entries include the roll-like volutus, and contrails, clouds formed from the vapour trail of aeroplanes. Since its first publication in 1896, the International Cloud Atlas has become an important reference tool for people working in meteorological services, aviation and shipping. The first edition contained 28 coloured photographs and set out detailed standards for classifying clouds. The last full edition was published in 1975 with a revision in 1987, which quickly became a collector's item. Now, embracing the digital era, the new atlas will initially be available as a web portal, and accessible to the public for the first time.
I thought "The Cloud" was just another term for someone else's computer.
Back in my day, we called it timesharing. Long life TSS/8, TSO and Multics (and their friends).
Now you kids get off my lawn.
Hope Amazon won't make these clouds all crash too!
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
That movie sucked so hard. The Wachowskis had some balls putting their name to it...
People sending pix of (suspicious) clouds to the Cloud Appreciation Society, a citizen science body, led to this "classification" into supposedly normal cloud types. According to the article. Classification does not make the clouds normal.
I thought "The Cloud" was just another term for someone else's computer. Back in my day, we called it timesharing. Long life TSS/8, TSO and Multics (and their friends).
Now you kids get off my lawn.
I think that misses the point. "The Cloud" refers to the commoditized outsourcing of certain aspects of maintaining a set of servers while keeping control of other aspects. Like: if you outsource the nothing, then it's a machine in your building that you bought/built yourself. If you outsource just rackspace, then it's an datacenter from the 90s. If you outsource hosting a VM, or scaleability, or distributed load balancing / replication, or worldwide redundancy, or keeping the host OS up-to-date with patches, or any kind of fancy bandwidth provision, or providing services like highly scalable data storage, then it's called The Cloud. Sure you could do those on Multics if you wanted (no one did).
"a low horizontal tube-shaped cloud mass that appears to roll about a horizontal axis" has been added to the catalog.
Thanks to your hard work and diligence, we now officially have the Asperitas cloud type.
{https://cloudappreciationsociety.org/}
I used to live and work in Cedar Rapids. I remember walking out of our office building in downtown on the day that the asperitas clouds were overhead. I remember thinking right away that there was something very unique about the clouds. I took a few pics and then used my BB messenger to alert my co-workers to come outside too (This was in 2006 when BlackBerry reigned). It was a spectacular sight! It sounds cheesy but it seriously was amazing. I spent the rest of my lunch hour catching glimpses of the sky until the formation started to dissipate. It looked like rough seas with high waves, upside down and hanging over the city. In all of my travels since, I've never seen that cloud formation again. I would love to though. It was an incredible sight!
Is this what that Tom Hanks movie was about?
When did asperatus, the original name, morph into asperitas?
I have pictures of this cloud type, taken on a local hike January 2013 in central Arizona.
No, that's a horsey!