About Cloudwright

The name comes from the old craft of the cloudwright: someone who read the sky as a working instrument rather than as scenery. That is the whole idea here. Every note in this atlas is written so that you can go outside, look up, and check it against the sky in the next ten minutes.

The field notes are organised around the World Meteorological Organization's classification, because a shared vocabulary is what makes an observation useful to anyone other than the observer. Genus, species, variety and supplementary feature are not academic distinctions; they are the difference between 'grey cloud' and 'altostratus, 2000-5500 m, sun disc no longer visible, rain in one to three hours'.

Each note carries a parametric cross-section plate generated from a small set of shape parameters rather than a photograph. That is a deliberate choice: a plate with an altitude scale and a labelled band teaches the structure of a cloud in a way that a beautiful photograph of one particular cloud does not.

Glossary entries are limited to terms that can actually be used outdoors. Definitions are kept short and every entry carries a field note explaining where the term earns its keep in an observation.

The site is published in English and Chinese with equivalent content in both. There are no accounts, no comments and no user-generated content.

At a glance

Field notes	18 cloud genus and feature notes, published progressively
Glossary terms	40 entries covering genera, species, varieties, features and origins
Languages	English and Simplified Chinese, equivalent content
Classification	World Meteorological Organization International Cloud Atlas
Contact	[email protected]