DES MOINES, Iowa — Looking out the window of her 11th-floor law office, Jane Wiggins did a double take and grabbed her camera.
The dark, undulating clouds hovering outside were unlike anything she had seen before.
“It looked like Armageddon,” said Wiggins, a paralegal and amateur photographer in Cedar Rapids. “The shadows of the clouds, the lights and the darks, and the greenish-yellow backdrop. They seemed to change.”
They dissipated within 15 minutes, but the photo Wiggins captured in June 2006 intrigued — and stumped — a group of dedicated weather watchers who now are pushing weather authorities to create a new cloud category, something that hasn’t been done since 1951.
Breaking into the cloud family would require surviving layers of skeptical international review. Still, Gavin Pretor-Pinney and his England-based Cloud Appreciation Society are determined to establish a new variety.
There are three main groups of clouds: cumulus, cirrus and stratus. Each has various subclassifications built on other details of the formation.
Brant Foote, a longtime scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, said the clouds photographed by Wiggins already fit into the existing cumulus classification.
But Pretor-Pinney, who never studied meteorology, believes the clouds merit their own cumulus subclassification. He proposes they be called altocumulus undulatus asperatus. The last word — Latin for roughen or agitate — is a reference to the clouds’ undulating surface.
Royal Meteorological Society executive director Paul Hardaker said a small panel within the society is gathering evidence to review.
“We like to believe that just about everything that can be seen has been, but you do get caught once in a while with the odd, new, interesting thing,” he said. “By this stage, we think it’s sufficiently interesting to explore it further, and we’re optimistic about the information we’ve got.”
