Do you know your volutus from your fluctus? Meet Gavin, the UK's top cloud boffin who says happiness lies in the sky The skies above us not only hold the key to contentment, they are also cirrus business. By Maddy Fletcher For You Magazine Published: 12:00 BST, 13 July 2024 | Updated: 12:00 BST, 13 July 2024 e-mail View comments In 2005, Gavin Pretor-Pinney travelled from England to Australia just to see a cloud. The cloud in question was a volutus, but locals in North Queensland call it ‘morning glory’.
You can see volutus clouds most places, but the versions you get in Australia are more frequent and more dramatic than anywhere else. Morning glory clouds are shaped like long tubes. They sit low in the sky – less than two kilometres above ground – and can stretch for 1,000 kilometres.
In the outback, glider pilots surf along them like they’re waves. Pretor-Pinney had to wait several days in a tiny remote town before a volutus finally appeared. Then he got into a Cessna plane – with the door taken off – and was flown alongside the cloud: ‘It was kind of wild.
’ Now 56 and living in Somerset with his wife and two children, Pretor-Pinney runs the Cloud Appreciation Society, a club dedicated to – no surprise here – the appreciation of clouds. On its website there’s a six-statement manifesto. The first reads: ‘We believe that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.
’ (Pretor-Pinney is also the author of six b.