About the guide

Cloud Point is a reference for naming what is overhead. Each entry pairs a photograph with the things worth knowing about a formation: how high it sits, what it is made of, what weather it tends to precede, and what it is commonly mistaken for.

How it is arranged

The guide runs to 52 entries — one for each week of the year. They cover the cloud genera and species you would expect, and also the supplementary features, accessory clouds and optical phenomena that sit on top of them, which is where most misidentification happens.

The library is ordered by altitude, because altitude is the first thing you can judge from the ground and it narrows the field fastest. All entries lists the same material in the order it runs through the year.

The photographs

Every plate carries its own credit and licence beneath it, linked back to the source. Where a photograph has not been added yet, the entry shows an empty plate rather than a stand-in image — a gap is more honest than a picture of the wrong cloud.

Who writes it

Laurence Wayne writes and maintains the guide. Corrections are welcome; the taxonomy follows the WMO International Cloud Atlas, and where the guide departs from it, that is a mistake rather than a house style.