The Cloud Book: How to Understand the Skies

LOOKING up into the skies represented, for me, a gaze into the unknown. Whilst I understood, like any student of British secondary school geography would, the basics behind cloud formation, convection, thermals and cloud types, the idiosyncrasies of each cloud, and the effect they have on weather, generally escaped me.Hamblyn's book has changed that. To pick up, The Cloud Book is instantly accessible with some truly stunning pictures adorning its pages showing off the 27 cloud types, and numerous other cloud-related phenomena (parhelions, lightning, auroras to name but a few) and offers up some interesting reading for even the most casual nephologist. On further inspection, this book shines as a tome of very interesting but not overly complicated descriptions of the cloud types, their implications for the weather and their likely transformations. That is one of the strengths of Hamblyn's book, that it affords you the opportunity to immerse oneself as far as one likes - either scratch the surface of learning cloud types or begin to piece together the bigger picture of cloud transformation and amalgamation.Each page is handily given over to a particular cloud type or phenomena and everything described by Hamblyn is accompanied by a wonderful full-colour picture. The text is digestible, the pages are well set-out and it is difficult to offer any criticism of the design and layout of the book.At times, admittedly, the book assumes some scientific knowledge of clouds which necessitates one reading over the same paragraph a couple of times to ensure understanding of the metamorphosis of ice crystals, Noctilucent clouds or whatever phenomena is at hand, but generally the book's accessibility is of great credit to Hamblyn.This was the absolute starter book for me and Hamblyn has achieved a deal of success in leaving me yearning for more knowledge on the subject. Fortunately my time with this book was accompanied by some terrific thunderstorms, offering me the opportunity to reflect on my reading in the shadow of some of the most incredible clouds offered up by the earth. I foresee this book serving as a very useful reference book for some time to come.

There have been a lot of books on clouds recently, some technical, some simply albums of attractive or curious photos. This one combines a brief, technical yet precise text with real "oooh-aaah" photographs. The photos are excellent and the layout good, so why only 3 stars? I felt this book fell between two stools. It is really too technical for it to serve as a good introduction for a child or the casual admirer of sky phenomena. On the other hand, the scientific stuff is skated through a bit too briskly, and with insufficient explanation, for anyone wanting a proper understanding of why clouds are like they are.The subtitle is "how to understand the skies", but in its eagerness to be brief and punchy, it leaves out too much of the background which would have explained weather systems and how they generate different types of cloud. Clearly the author didn't want to put people off with pages of text and lots of complex diagrams, but there is happy medium and I would have expected a book produced by the Met Office to go into things in more depth.To give an idea of what I mean about the text; on page 130 there is a description of a "sun pillar" coinciding witha "parhelic arc" to make a cross of light in the sky. A mildly interesting phenomenom, except that this is what persuaded the Emperor Constantine to make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, so undoubtedly the most historically influential optical effect of all time . . . Checking the index, this is the ONLY reference to a "parhelic arc". Is it the same as a "parhelion"? This is shown on p 129 as a vertical stripe some way away from the sun, so it could hardly form a cross with the vertical "sun pillar". So we are baffled, quite unnecessarily.Most of the photographs are taken in the UK (unlike some of the other books). Each double-page spread has a large photo and a brief but quite scientific explanation right next to the text - not always the case in other books. There are sections on "clouds and climate change" and on "optical effects", a definition which includes lightning, aurora borealis, rainbows, sundogs and so on.So who will want this book? If you are seriously into clouds, do buy it; the photos are absolutely wonderful and, with the aid of some more detailed publications, you'll get a great deal from it. Even if you just want to "ooh-aah" at the lovely pictures it is still a great buy if you get a bargain copy. I will use it in conjunction with Gavin Pretor-Pinney's  The Cloudspotter's Guide , an excellent text let down by a dull format and lack of decent illustrations. Anyone wanting a good book on the British weather, informative and interesting, could do worse than get  Climate and the British Scene , an inexpensive reprint of the original New Naturalist title.

A useful introductionThis book is a useful introduction to the observation of clouds, and is well illustrated. It starts with a historical review of meteorology, and then goes into the classification and types of clouds, with photographs and accompanying text. Very much a coffee-table book, and one perhaps designed to be glanced through rather than actually read in detail.Photographs are very good, almost without exception. The exceptions include the various references to 'lenticular' clouds, where the illustrations are almost unrecognisable as such. Far better photos of this spectacular phenomenon are to be found on the Internet. Perhaps the problem is that the editor has chosen photographs from the British Isles, whereas the best examples are to be found in the Canadian Rockies..The text could be better, both in presentation and in content. First, it is not comfortable to read unless you have the most acute eyesight. The font selected seems to be Calibri Light, size 9, in a grey ink rather than a black one. This is small enough to allow one quarter, sometimes two quarters, of the page to be left blank, thus turning the layout into a pretty pattern that nicely balances the full page photograph opposite. It becomes even prettier when the off-white background is sometimes replaced by a faded shot of a cloudy sky; but it does make it more difficult to read.The book does not pretend to go into the science of cloud formation in any detail, and covers the basic processes quite well, but more information would sometimes have been welcome. Given, for example, the strongly rhythmic appearance of mackerel skies and herringbone clouds, the reader feels there must be some strong underlying force responsible for this, but he is left wondering as to its nature.