Not quite in the clouds

I continue to work on learning to identify clouds. I went an scenic airplane flight with a great young pilot yesterday. It was a great flight, but a bit on the bumpy side. We were not flying very high, about 2,500 ft AGL going west and about 3,000 ft on the return flight going east.

As we were flying back, I told the pilot that I was studying weather, including identifying clouds. So we started talking about the scattered clouds that were about 1,000 ft or so above us. He pointed to one cloud just ahead of us, and said that is a cumulus cloud, and when we fly under it we will feel some turbulence. And yes, I felt the turbulence as we flew under the cloud.

I don't feel like am exactly in a position to say much more on clouds. But my flight yesterday did get me thinking about resources on the web where those of you are interested can go and learn more about clouds.

The National Weather Service has an online school of weather broken down into several topics. There topic on synoptic meteorology includes lessons on clouds and cloud classifications.

If you go to the cloud classification page, you will see that clouds are divided into high, middle, and low level clouds. Within each level are nine categories of clouds. You will see a sky watcher chart on this webpage with clickable pictures. You can learn about the 27 categories of clouds plus some special clouds. For example, here is a picture and some information about a cumulus cloud that may have been similar to the ones we flew under yesterday.

NASA has some nice resources for learning about clouds, including the aforementioned Sky Watcher Chart (you can download) and links to other resources on clouds, some of which are geared towards young people. I can tell you that this older person enjoyed these resources. Here is the NASA page on an Introduction to Clouds. Note, I tried to access this page on Feb. 13, 2012 and it seemed to be either offline or unavailable to the general public. In the event that this outage is temporary, I'm including the url here.

If you want to learn how clouds affect aviation interests, Pilot Outlook has a page on clouds.