photo #7412684

William Clement Ley was a nineteenth-century English clergyman who dedicated a large portion of his life to studying the atmosphere and clouds in particular. ‘My own earliest recollections,’ he said in a lecture in 1879, ‘are those of looking at the clouds, and forming infantine speculations as to the causes of their forms and movements… to this day I have spent nearly a twelfth part of my waking existence in that occupation.’ His work focussed on deciphering how clouds could be used to forecast the weather, culminating eventually in the publication of his book Cloudland: A Study on the Structure and Characters of Clouds in 1894, just two years before his death.The book was also published two years before the very first International Cloud Atlas reference work on cloud classification. Cloudland contains Ley’s own summary of cloud classifications, with some familiar names as well as some he proposed that never quite caught on. This illustration from his book shows a low-level blanket of cloud which he titled ‘Stratus Quietus’, an intriguing and strangely apt name for a cloud we would now call Stratocumulus undulatus.Plate 2 from Cloudland: A Study on the Structure and Characters of Clouds (1894) by William Clement Ley. This Cloud-a-Day was suggested by Andy Barker (Member 48,349).