Gavin Pretor-Pinney

Sep 24, 2024 | rte.ie | Gavin Pretor-Pinney

What's the difference between a nimbostratus and an altocumulus cloud? What about a horseshoe vortex or a contrail? This is what Gavin Pretor-Pinney, Author and Visiting Fellow at The Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, has set out to explain in his book Cloudspotting for Beginners. He joined RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne to talk about different types of clouds and why we should pay more attention to the sky above us.

Jun 22, 2024 | thetimes.com | Gavin Pretor-Pinney |William Grill

The British pharmacist Luke Howard loved clouds so much that he came up with a system for naming them. One winter night in 1802, at a London science society, he declared that we should give clouds Latin names such as cumulus and stratus. We use Latin for plants and animals, he argued — why not clouds? Howard showed his audience cloud paintings indicating the shapes we can learn to recognise, though any name might work only at a particular moment before the cloud changes into a different type.

Oct 2, 2023 | shepherd.com | Tom Ireland |Gavin Pretor-Pinney |Peter Godfrey-Smith |Richard Dawkins

Thanks to this beautiful book, I try to take a moment each day to look up at the sky. The Cloudspotter’s Guide is so much more than just a guide to the science of how clouds form, or the different types – it’s a reminder to appreciate the unbelievably beautiful and epic natural forms that float above us every day. Clouds, writes Pretor-Pinney, are ‘the most egalitarian of nature’s displays – we all have a good view of them’.