The Cloud Book

An updated edition of The Cloud Book, featuring 12 new recognised cloud forms. This guide to the clouds helps you identify cloud types and understand their implications for the weather. It follows a logical progression from low clouds to high stratus clouds, and on to special clouds, with a foreword from the Met Office's chief meteorologist.

Learn how to understand the skies with this comprehensive cornerstone guide to cloudspotting.

Clouds have been the object of fascination throughout history, their fleeting magnificence and endless variability providing food for thought for scientists and daydreamers alike.

Clouds may have many individual shapes, but there are a few basic forms. In this definitive guide to the clouds and the skies, Richard Hamblyn introduces you to all the different cloud species. The Met Office Cloud Book will enable you to identify individual clouds, skies and phenomena. You will also be able to track their likely changes over time and predict the implications they have for the weather you may experience.

Produced in association with the Met Office – the world's premier weather forecasting bureau – all things to do with the origin and development of a cloud are here. Whether you are looking at a giant cumulonimbus or a tiny shred of stratus factus, an everyday occurrence or a fleeting rarity, your cloudspotting will be expertly informed and much more satisfying with this handy reference guide. This book will enable you to not only identify individual clouds and skies as they might appear at any given moment, but also to track their likely changes over time, and thus predict weather patterns.

This new edition brings this classic and bestselling book completely up to date, including 12 new cloud types only recently officially recognised by the World Meteorological Organization. Many of these previously only had informal names, but their new Latin classification brings them into the fold of officially adopted global meteorological terms.

The Met Office Cloud Book includes a detailed introduction on the history of cloud classification and is illustrated with stunning images from around the globe.

200 colour photographs

About the Author

Dr Richard Hamblyn is the author of The Invention of Clouds (2002), which won the LA Times Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. He is also the author of The Cloud Book (2008), Extraordinary Clouds (2009) and Extraordinary Weather (2012). He is currently Writer in Residence at the Environment Institute, University College London.