I don't want to say I don't appreciate nature, I do but I have to be honest the only time I ever bothered taking more than 5 seconds to look at the sky is when it's getting cloudy about to rain which I hate a lot. But this morning I decided to not only look at it but even take photos of it.
Why did I do that? Well I just did, don't even know why.
I look at the sky and all I see is a blue background with some white stuff on it, aka the clouds which I used to pay attention to when I was little, but that was only when it makes awkward shapes like someone kissing someone.
I would look and say oh, nice, and that’d be it. But today I decided to pay attention to it. I took a few simple pictures of the sky. I wanted peaceful pictures of bright blue and big clouds in white thankfully id a bright but still chilly morning. When I looked back through them later, I wondered why those clouds seemed so opaque. Why do some clouds look like cotton wool while others seem like dark smoke? That little thought led me to research on them on Google.
You probably think there are only a few cloud types. I thought the same. Then I searched and I was surprised.
There is a whole classification that gives clouds names based on where they usually occur and what they look like. My big puffy clouds had an actual name, Cumulus. Sometimes they are Cumulus humilis, sometimes Cumulus mediocris, I never knew any of this.
I learned about Cirrus that float high up in the sky and are so thin that sunlight passes through them, Altocumulus that look like many small sheep all packed together, Stratocumulus which cover the entire sky in gray sheets, Cirrocumulus which appear as white lines or grains set against a blue sky and lenticular clouds which form on top of mountains.
I'm not going to going too much into details because that's as much as I could learn right now.
Now when I look up, there is more than just a sky. There are tiers of form and function. There is something complex and all this has really shifted my perception, how I see the world around me. Something we see everyday we take for granted but have so much complexity to it.
And another interesting fact about the movement of the clouds, earth and the atmosphere is that clouds move because of the wind, the atmosphere moves with the Earth, the Earth is our frame of reference. The wind of the Earth has effect, either directly or indirectly on the Earth.
At and below the boundary layer which is the first 3000ft of the atmosphere, friction with the Earth’s surface actually slows down the wind.
