I caught these clouds tonight at around 5:40 pm facing southwest:

After a little discussion, we suspect one of them is stratocumulus because:

• it’s made up of long puffy cotton wads,
• it’s a relatively low cloud,
• as The Cloudspotter’s Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney says, they look like “someone couldn’t find the off switch on the cotton candy machine” (page 95).

They’re formed by something called temperature inversion which, for now, we won’t get into. It’s late and my devotion to keeping a cloud diary doesn’t extend that far tonight.

Here’s the stratocumulus at about 6:15 pm:

Back to the first photo, the wispy things are most likely cirrostratus. I’ve been waiting to see a cirrostratus, the cheesecloth veil of the skies. They are formed as warm air slowly rises, meeting cirrus clouds. Like all high level clouds, once they get to that part of the troposphere, they’re pretty well all ice crystals.

Here’s a cirrus captured pink in the sunset glow around 6:15 pm:

There’s also been some discussion as to whether or not that’s a contrail, the man-made cloud from high altitude planes. The cloud lay toward the southwest as all tonight’s photos, which is roughly the direction of the Vancouver International Airport from the photo-snapping position.

We discussed today the direction our cloud education will take. Hopefully by the end of this upcoming week, we’ll effortlessly point to the skies and blurt out “altocumulus” or “cirrostratus” or whatever celestial fluffball happens to float by. Once we’ve gotten to that stage, we want to advance to explaining how that nimbocumulus got that way. Finally, we’ll impress friends and business associates at garden parties with obscure cloud minutiae.

Today I had no time before it got dark to catch any clouds, except this fellow toward the south as I drove home. I tried to rush over to the west part of town where some exciting sunset cloud action was happening, but was not able to photograph anything as I got distracted by the film crew in the truck stop. Some movie set in “Grover Cleveland,” according to the big film sign.

But this baby, yeah, it’s altostratus again. Mid-level, sun-blocker, occasional precipitation. Consulting Weather: A Visual Guide by Bruce Buckley, Edward J. Hopkins and Richard Whitaker, this wet blanket was somewhere between 2000 and 6100 metres above me.

A coworker also keeping a cloud diary emailed me today to ask me if what she did see on her drive to work was indeed an altostratus and a bunch of altocumuluses. I haven’t spotted any altocumulus yet, so I couldn’t verify this sighting.

This morning’s cloud fulfills some of the characteristics of altostratus: mid-level stratiform grey cloud covering the sun so that no shadows are cast. “Altostratus has sometimes been described as a boring cloud,” says my copy of The Weather Identification Handbook by Storm Dunlop (that’s really his name).

Damn, as I right this, our altostratus has thinned enough that I have the sun in my eyes and a shadow on the wall behind me. Sometimes altostratus does let the sun shine through.

Usually altostratus is more uniform, whereas this cloud has more puffy bits.

Nevertheless, the altostratus usually precedes rainy nimbostratus. So guess what I saw farther to the west?

This dark grey cloud means a rainy day in Vancouver. Unlike altostratus, it’s thick enough that you can’t see any indication of sun. Though altostratus may or may not drop its water load, nimbostratus almost certainly will bring precipitation.

Update: Towards the end of the day, I saw a whole mess of clouds. Unfortunately, I could only sneak out of work to catch a few of them. Check out these cumulus:

Here’s a detail - almost makes you think I was in an airplane (about to leave this hellhole that is Vancouver).

Because I need to know all about clouds by March 28 (never mind why), I need a cloud diary. Because I need to marry the photos I take of our daily clouds with my notes on what I observe, what better medium for a cloud diary than the blog.

So.

Today, I am guessing that the 5 pm photo above shows a stratus cloud. Mind you, I suspect in Vancouver every day will be a stratus cloud day. How do we know it’s a stratus? It’s a featureless grey layer, basically a fog in the sky. Fog is just a stratus cloud at ground-level. The stratus is a low-level cloud, but higher. So it’s a stratus cloud. Or is it?

Here’s where I get confused. There was this rain thing happening as these supposed stratus clouds dominated today’s skies. Yet, stratus clouds have little precipitation. This stratus, however, was precipitating plenty. Yes, it was drizzle, heavy drizzle in continuous streams. The stratiform clouds - stratus is Latin for layer - include the annoyingly mysterious stratus and the nimbostratus cloud. Nimbostratus is the more rainy one. However, nimbostratus has a ragged bottom, while this one was wispy.