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 books about clouds. His latest, Cloudspotting for Beginners , was published this month.) He came to clouds late.
In the 1990s Pretor-Pinney co-founded a magazine called The Idler , which specialised in ‘literature for loafers’. He worked at the publication for a decade until 2003, when he decided to take a six-month sabbatical and move to Rome. Every morning in Italy , Pretor-Pinney would open his window and see the same thing: another blue sky.
It’s not that there aren’t any clouds in Rome – ‘you get these amazing storm clouds at certain times of the year’ – but ‘the norm was much more of a predictable sky’. At first, ‘I was like, “This is amazing. Sky! Sunshine! I’m on holiday!”’ But after a while, ‘I realised I was missing something.
That sort of changeability. The idea that the sky might be a new page to read when you open the curtains.’ He started thinking, often, about clouds.
When he returned to the UK, Pretor-Pinney had, in his words, ‘banged on’ so much about clouds that a friend of his, who was running a literary festival in Cornwall, asked if he would give a speech about the skies. He agreed, calling his talk ‘The Inaugural Lecture of the Cloud Appreciation Society’, to attract spectators. It worked – Pretor-Pinney’s speech was packed.
Also, several audience members asked him how they could join his club. Of course, he didn’t actually have a Cloud Appreciation Society. So he bought a book that explained how to build websites and made one.
Initially membership was free – ‘because I was seeing this as a laugh’ – and all the society really consisted of was a picture gallery where users could post photographs they’d taken of clouds. The London skyline from Primrose Hill Eventually, Pretor-Pinney charged the price of a stamp and members received a certificate and badge in the post. Within a few months, the society had 2,000 paying members.
At the end of 2005, Yahoo named it Britain’s most ‘weird and wonderful’ website and thousands more signed up. Now, almost 20 years later, there have been 63,000 members and running the association and writing cloud books has become Pretor-Pinney’s full-time job. Membership is more expensive – £36 a year – but it gets you a certificate, badge, ‘cloud selector wheel’, and a subscription to the society’s Cloud-a-Day newsletter.
People who join the Cloud Appreciation Society really appreciate clouds. Pretor-Pinney has known members to throw cloud-themed weddings and cloud-themed funerals. Once, at a talk he gave on clouds, a man showed him his membership number, tattooed on his arm.
I meet Pretor-Pinney at the top of North London’s Primrose Hill for a cloudspotting walk. The weather is cloudy. Possibly, I think, as I approach our meeting place, too cloudy.
The sky seems to be one enormous grey cloth. Other than the giant one above me, I wonder what clouds there are to spot. But by the time I reach the top of the hill the situation has changed.
In the distance, above The Shard and St Paul’s Cathedral, the big grey cloud is breaking up into smaller ones. That continuous cloth of cloud I was worrying about is called stratocumulus and is, says Pretor-Pinney, the ‘most plentiful cloud’ on earth. When the weather warms, a stratocumulus cloud will dissipate and form individual clumps called cumulus.
These are the smaller type I can see above the skyline. Once you start looking – really looking – at a stratocumulus breaking up, the whole process becomes wonderfully dramatic. ‘In London, the sky is the last wilderness within easy reach,’ says Pretor-Pinney.
‘You don’t have to live in an area of outstanding natural beauty to see outstandingly beautiful skies.’ Cumulus clouds tend to be the ones that people see shapes in. When I ask Pretor-Pinney what the most popular figure spotted is, he says, without hesitation, an elephant.
He has a theory that, because cumulus clouds are created by columns of warm air, as they dissipate the dwindling column forms something that looks like a trunk. ‘I joke that if you pay attention to the shapes you see in the clouds, you’ll save money on psychoanalysis,’ says Pretor-Pinney. Later on our walk I see a cloud in the shape of a heart.
I assume this means good things for my love life but then, within about ten seconds, the heart cloud has split – cleanly, dramatically – in two. I don’t want to think too much about what this represents. Clouds are formed by billions of tiny water droplets clustering together and reflecting light in a way that makes them seem opaque.
They vary in size, but a small cumulus cloud, say, is about one kilometre wide and one kilometre tall. According to the Cloud Appreciation Society’s library, there are ten main cloud types. The cumulus and stratocumulus clouds above Primrose Hill are bog-standard.
(The library entry for cumulus reads: ‘If you’ve never spotted a cumulus cloud, then you need to get out more.’) But there are 30 other types that are more dramatic and rare. Are there any you can’t see in Britain? ‘I don’t think so,’ says Pretor-Pinney.
Even noctilucent clouds – the highest type in the atmosphere, which form 80 or 90 kilometres above ground – appear in high-latitude places like Scotland. ‘They’re so high they shine at night,’ he says, ‘this kind of airy, ghostly blue against the dark.’ (Pretor-Pinney himself has seen every modification of cloud except for the ‘horseshoe vortex’ – a U-shaped wisp of cloud that lasts for only a few minutes.
‘I’ve seen a bazillion photos, but never actually witnessed one.’) Some clouds, like the horseshoe vortex, dissipate within minutes; other, stormier clouds can last for several hours, even days. But all eventually turn into vapour.
That temporary quality ‘sort of forces you to make the most of it. Because if you say, “I’ll come back to that later..
.” Well, that’s not going to happen, is it?’ And if you can appreciate something ordinary like a cloud, says Pretor-Pinney, ‘I think that’s where happiness lies. It’s not about thinking you’ve got to rush off somewhere else and see something exciting.
It’s about finding what is amazing and beautiful right here in front of you. It’s one of the hardest things to do, but if you can do it, it’s really a profound gift. It gives you a grounding.
The more I’ve thought about it over the years, having your head in the clouds every now and then helps you keep your feet on the ground.’ I haven't seen that one before Asperitas A bumpy-looking cloud that appears after a thunderstorm. Only added to the International Cloud Atlas in 2017, it is officially the world’s newest formation.
Fluctus A fleeting cloud that looks like waves, it’s caused by a combination of hot and cold air. This might have been what Van Gogh saw when he painted Starry Night. Horseshoe Vortex The only cloud Pretor-Pinney is yet to spot.
These U-shaped wisps are formed by gusts of rotating air and stay in the sky for a few minutes before dissipating. Voltus A low-level tube-shaped cloud that is often found in coastal areas and travels at up to 35mph. It’s long, too – some volutus clouds stretch up to 1,000km.
Cloudspotting for Beginners by Gavin Pretor-Pinney and William Grill is published by Penguin, £20. To order a copy for £17 until 28 July, go to mailshop.co.
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