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International atlas updated in digital form.

"I wandered lonely as a cloud

"That floats on high o'er vales and hills "

Some people love Wordsworths "Daffodils," but I always connected to the opening lines, to that image of the lonely floating cloud. But then, of course, I love clouds.

Im not talking clouds as in cloud computing, as in banks of servers accessed from any location. Nope, Im talking fluffy bits of cotton candy water skipping across the sky. Deep, roiling, rolling gray banks portending rain. Thin stretches of cobwebby filmy filaments against the red-orange-pink of a setting sun.

All these clouds have a proper name and category about 100 in all most of which I seem unable to remember. Cirrus, nimbus, cumulus Luckily for me and for other cloud and weather aficionados this kind of cloud computing just got a new image. Literally.

World Meteorological Day 2017 featured the theme Understanding Clouds, and the World Meteorological Organization celebrated that theme by launching the new International Cloud Atlas, available for the first time in digital form. Hard as it may be to believe, during the atlass last update in 1987 the web and all things digital werent.

It turns out that clouds create more than a backdrop for pictures or an inspiration for dreamers. Clouds drive the Earths water cycle and climate system. They help us forecast weather and serve as a warning signal to dangerous weather.

Consistent cloud observations support climate and hydrology studies and build a long-term record of weather, but getting to that consistency needed a common set of definitions and language. After all, clouds can be a bit challenging to describe: I see an elephant, you see a mushroom. My elephant or your mushroom might look like someone elses llama or carrot. Obviously thats no way to track the weather.

By the early 1800s work was underway to create a repeatable method for describing clouds and cloudlike objects. Eventually, the atlas emerged, providing a framework for global standard cloud observation. A weather scientist sees a cumulus humilis and when he or she says that, every other weather scientist around the world knows what type of cloud was spotted. As poetic as a mushroom sitting next to a carrot might be, that type of description does not create a consistent database entry.

The World Meteorological Organization, an agency of the United Nations, serves as a sort of global ground zero of information interchange about all things weather, climate and water cycle in other words, it coordinates data about those physical world attributes that dont pay much attention to puny human boundaries. As part of this effort, it oversees the International Cloud Atlas. The atlas, in turn, serves as the authoritative and comprehensive cloud reference; its first edition appeared in 1896 and weve been talking about the nimbus and cumulus ever since.

The Earth has changed since that first edition and so have the tools weve used to see and record those changes. Not only did the 2017 atlas go digital, it also nodded to technology by adding 11 new types of clouds. Some of these cloud types were brought to the fold by a global citizens science effort whose spotting and documentation efforts are enabled by technology, while other newly admitted clouds are literally the byproduct of technology.

The work and supporting photography of the 43,000-member Cloud Appreciation Society showed again that science no longer belongs to a small priesthood of practitioners. These global cloud-spotters have been documenting observations and championing them to the World Meteorological Organization since 2006. And yes, there is an app for that so glad you asked. It is called, logically enough, the cloud-spotter app (https://cloudspotterapp.com), and in January it hit the 250,000th submitted cloud milestone.

So join me in extending a warm welcome to the asperitas cloud, a sort of rougher, more chaotic undulatus formation, which cloud-spotters say began appearing often enough that it needed its own designation. Enter, too, the flammagenitus, a type of cloud generated by fire or combustion, and the homogenitus, a cloud created by human activity, like one you might see above a cooling tower at a power plant or trailing behind an airplane.

And, of course, welcome to the fully digital International Cloud Atlas (https://www.wmocloudatlas.org/home.html), where we can all learn to be cloud-spotters too. Or, at the very least, try out the Find a Cloud feature. May I suggest that theres nothing like a nice puffy, white cumulus to put a smile on even the grayest of days.

Teresa Martin lives, breathes and writes about the intersection of technology, business and humanity. Read more of her recent columns at http://www.capecodtimes.com/teresamartin.

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Teresa Martin: Cloud computing gets new image - Nantucket Island Inquirer