All audio transcribed
âThereâs three main types of clouds and then lots and lots of subsections to them. Youâve got cirrus clouds which tend to be long, wispy, and theyâre always going in a certain direction, theyâre very driven by the wind. Youâve got stratus which is more heavy cloud cover which most of us would be used to in the Autumn and in the spring time when itâs just sat there heavy, it looks like a solid lump of cloud but if you really look at it there are gaps but not a lot. Cumulus is the main one we see most of the time, which is a large clump of clouds, which weâll see as thick and pillowy, what most people would think of as a cloud. The cumulus has got loads of subsections, youâve got the cumulonimbus which is big pillowy clouds but theyâre more closely packed so you may get a completely clear blue sky with this huge lump of cloud in it but no little wisps on the edges, theyâll all be in that one big mass. Then you get altocumulus which is the opposite, pillowy clouds but hundreds of them, so you can barely see the sky through them. Cirrocumulus is the same but even finer, you can see the blue sky through it but itâs almost like someone has emptied a massive bag of cotton balls in the air. Um, a lot of the weather conditions that we have will produce a certain sky, but some of the skies you will only see over certain grounds. Deserts tend to have cloud masses that we canât have over our land because weâve got too much water. Over the really out in the middle of the pacific and the Mediterranean seas, they will have clouds formations that you canât see over land because of the amount of water. Um, a stratocumulus tends to be more over heavily wooded areas where thereâs quite a large density of water, a lot of your Amazon rainforests they will have the stratocumulus more than like our land would have. Itâs all down to how much water the clouds are holding and where the water is coming from. Over your deep seas the water is salty which means it is heavier, and will produce a different cloud form to what you will get over a fresh water mass, because salt will affect how much water is held in those clouds. Now, deviating from what the actual technical names for everything are, the important thing to remember with clouds is from the beginning for time people have used clouds to help us interpret what the weather is doing. The clouds are not there simply to make the cloud- the sky look pretty, they are there as a complete indication to the water levels that are in the air. My best way of describing this is if you are in the shower and it is cold outside you will make condensation on your windows, that is the same as how a clouds is made. If the inside air is warmer than the outside you will get condensation, if your inside air is colder than outside you will not. Um, clouds are formed by the air picking up water from the ground and turning it into clouds ready for the water to be redistributed onto the land when the clouds dictate. Some people think that the clouds are a separate entity to weather, theyâre not, they are part of the weather, but they are our visual representation of what the weather is doing. You can stand outside and have a wind swirling round you and you do not know what direction the wind is actually in, because perhaps youâre in your back garden and youâre in a bit of a tunnel and it may be coming at you from every direction. Look up to the clouds because clouds will only be going in one direction, whichever way the wind is blowing them, that is the direction of the wind, so you can use the clouds to help you with that. You can also determine from the clouds how wet it is or how wet it is likely to become. In the middle of summer, youâll have a pretty clear blue sky, there might be a couple of little scuddy clouds about if thereâs a bit of wind around but theyâre very unlikely to drop their water on us, theyâre going to go and find a larger clouds mass to join to, but itâs probably not going to be over you. But when you suddenly see a blanket sky that looks like completely unbroken cloud we are going to have rain at some point, the darkness of the clouds will dictate whether the rain is going to be heavy, the darker the cloud the more water it has and the chances are it will come out, and we will get wet. In the past, people have used clouds to con other people, by trying to pretend that they are magic, that they hold magic or they hold powers. They donât, itâs just that they were clever at interpreting what the clouds were going to do. The only way I can explain this is youâve all seen films, youâve all read books where some mage, or wizard, or witch, will suddenly dictate that there will be a massive rainfall, or youâre going to get struck by lightning or things like this, they looked at the clouds which has given them an indication thereâs a storm coming. Most people can also feel a storm is coming because you begin to feel different, the air pressure has changed, but back in those times people werenât switched on to that kind of thing, so all of a sudden your main leader that has been claiming that they understand all of these things, they will con them into believing that they have made it rain, they have made it thunder, only because theyâve read the weather conditions. Our visibility is there with clouds, we cannot see any other kind of weather, but we can see clouds, and that will tell us what the weather is liable to do. The official met office use the clouds very heavily. They will watch cloud formations coming in from another country over to ours, see what direction itâs coming in, is it growing thicker? is it getting thinner? that will tell them roughly whatâs floating over us for the next 24 hours, 48 hours, whichever way they wish to go. Um, which means that they are using the clouds to try and pre warn us what is likely to happen. Sometimes they get caught out because the wind will suddenly change direction and that cloud mass doesnât come to us at all, it carries on floating out in a different direction, but usually they will follow paths. Um, I find it more interesting to look at old civilizations to see how they used clouds. Most civilizations used the clou- used the clouds for their own purposes. Fishing villages will use the cloud formations to tell them âHang on, weâre not taking the boats out too far today there is definitely a storm going to come out over to oceanâ because they can see the cloud formations that are going to cause that. Certain types of sky will also fit to certain types of people. Your farming communities will have their own colloquial names for a certain looking sky, so will your fishing communities. Fishing communities have things that they call like a mackerel sky, where all the clouds are scudding across the sky and if you actually look at them they do look like the stripes on a mackerel. But those skies will tell the fisherman it is safe to go out, weâve got a mackerel sky so, we might get a little bit of rain but itâs not going to be anything too horrendous, itâs not going to be too dangerous to anybody so yeah weâll go fishing. And it also has managed to cut the glare of the sun to the point that the fish are going to be almost blinded to whatâs above them. Farmers will use the clouds quite a bit for them to decide âwe need to go and harvest fairly soon, oh my gosh look at the state of those clouds up there I think we need to harvest right now because thereâs bad weather on its way and we need to get this in before it gets soakedâ, um itâs all that kind of thing. Going back to the real old civilizations where Wicca people were around a lot believing in all kinds of magic, they were very heavily into nature, whereas weather is a huge part of nature. Their life cycles depended very much on what the weather was doing, um, so they would use it very much to make their decisions as to what was going to get done. Certain types of clouds will tell you when good weatherâs coming, when bad weathers coming, whether itâs going to be wet, whether itâs going to be dry, and bear in mind for those civilizations sometimes what we would call bad weather, sudden downpours of rain, they might be waiting for, they might be wanting that. Out on things like the Serengeti, they very rarely have rain. But when you watch your wildlife programs and the rainy season starts if you actually pay attention and look at what the sky is doing you can see the clouds rolling in, theyâre heavy, theyâre black, theyâre thick, they are going to down load hundreds of tons of water in a very short amount of time, and they do flood places like the Serengeti because they are so dry. Um, but you will also have places that are permanently wet and all of a sudden the skies, the clouds have dispersed and they are going to have a dry season, probably not for long, but they will be able to see these things coming, and therefore there are certain things that happen through the year that they will either bring forwards or delay if they donât have the weather conditions theyâre requiring. Um, the whole world, and the whole of nature is dependent on weather, everything, everybodyâs life cycle is dependent on weather. Certain crops can grow, or certain crops can fail if the weather conditions are right, or if theyâre wrong. Very important for farmers, very important for livestock owners. If you can see that certain weather conditions are coming you may not want your sheep roaming up on the highlands you might need to bring them down. Our first indication is to look at the sky. Now a day not so many people do it because we have constant weather reports on television and media and everything else, but in the olden days they didnât have any of that, they did heavily rely on what they could see and how they could interpret it. Most of your older civilizations would reserve there to be one particular person that would be able to interpret these things which gave them a really big seat of power because other people didnât understand how they knew these things; they just studied clouds. Most people when youâre a kid, youâve led down in a field at some point in the summer when itâs really nice and thereâs little fluffy pillowy clouds around and youâve led there and youâve decided if you can see horses or fish or people and most people look at the clouds and see what they can see as a laugh or a joke as something to entertain yourself with. Thatâs exactly how people that need more information will also look at the clouds, theyâre not looking for faces theyâre not looking for horses theyâre looking for what the clouds are doing. Are they dispersing and getting thinner? Are they getting thicker? telling us whether the weather is coming in or whether the weather is going out. Um, if youâre looking over a land mass, if you can get yourself high enough that you can see a large land mass you can watch a storm come right through, you can see where itâs starting, you can see where it ultimately ends up going, and you can see what destruction it can do in between, similarly with good weather you can see the good weather following things, the weather it will have a path but the only way to see the path is to watch the clouds.â
