Crowdsourcing App Takes Cloud And Weather Watching To The Next Level

TOPSHOT – Lenticular clouds are pictured on January 14, 2024 in La Possession as authorities on France’s Indian Ocean Reunion Island urged residents to top off on meals and water forward of a tropical storm that dangers strengthening to a cyclone earlier than it hits later tonight. The storm, dubbed Belal, may hammer the island with winds of as much as 150 km/h (90 mph) if it solely passes close by, in accordance with the Meteo France climate service. (Photograph by Richard BOUHET / AFP) (Photograph by RICHARD BOUHET/AFP by way of Getty Photographs)

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September 12, 2025, is Cloud Appreciation Day in accordance with the Cloud Appreciation Society. Their website encourages everybody to, “Look as much as admire the fantastic thing about the clouds.” As I little one, that’s precisely what I used to do. My curiosity with cloud patterns led to a profitable profession in meteorology. A long time later, a brand new app has emerged that modernizes the concept of cloud watching.

The app is known as SeeMyClouds, and it was developed by Bruce Albrecht. The professor emeritus on the College of Miami describes it as a social-media platform the place climate and cloud fans, college students, educators and photographers can share cloud images and benefit from the images of others. He instructed me in an e mail, “Pictures of clouds of all kinds are welcomed as are images of atmospheric optical results because of clouds—like sunsets, rainbows, and halos. After all, images of extreme climate phenomena are very a lot welcomed.”

Meteorology has been a ardour of mine since I used to be a younger boy. I consumed nearly each guide within the library that confirmed cloud sorts. In most simple faculties, college students are uncovered to 3 or 4 primary cloud sorts, however there are such a lot of extra. Clouds are described by their kind, altitude and different traits. In addition they present clues about climate circumstances and play a big function in our local weather. Nonetheless, clouds fascinate, encourage, and even scare folks.

At my son’s monitor meet this 12 months, many individuals have been buzzing about an ominous-looking shelf cloud that moved over the stadium. I’ve pulled over many instances to snap an image of an interesting cloud formation. Albrecht instructed me, “Taking cloud images is extra standard than ever, due to the comfort of smartphones with high-quality cameras. These snapshots, simply uploaded to social media, let folks share their favourite cloud moments with buddies and fellow fans. Information helps his claims. Fb’s Cloud Appreciation Society group has 670,000 members. Nonetheless, that wasn’t at all times the case.

As an atmospheric scientist, I used to be fairly accustomed to Bruce Albrecht’s work. He’s a famous scholar who research convection, the atmospheric boundary layer, tropical meteorology, and turbulence. So why did he grow to be so enthusiastic about clouds. His analysis portfolio actually included cloud-climate interactions and utilizing advancing observing strategies for clouds, however there was extra.

By e mail, he instructed me, “My journey into sharing cloud images on social media started within the early 2000s. At the moment, I observed a decline within the variety of folks visiting nationwide parks and different site-seeing areas.” He attributed that to the supply of on-line entry. He went on to say, “Whereas instructing on the College of Miami, I typically noticed college students strolling throughout campus fully absorbed of their telephones, not often glancing up on the sky above them.” This impressed him to flip the expertise script by, “Utilizing the very gadgets that distract us to assist folks rediscover the sky.” That epiphany led him to amass SeeMyClouds.com and to develop the app, which is now out there in main app shops. The app, in contrast to common photo-sharing apps, options cloud classification tags, permitting customers to label the cloud sorts of their images.

Signal me up. This can be a distinctive app for the climate geeks (like me) or these impressed by the fantastic thing about nature above us.