Cloudspotting may sound cuckoo, but it’s growing in popularity, and Ireland’s first cloud festival will celebrate all things white and fluffy
PERCHED LOW upon the water amid a vast expanse of sky, Sally McKenna of the Bridgestone Guides series experienced an awakening to the elements. Floating in her kayak off the west Cork coast, the food writer began to appreciate clouds. This epiphany led her to organise what she believe’s is Ireland’s first cloud festival, a collection of sky gazers, astronomers, meteorologists and naturalists coming together in Skibbereen, Co Cork, for a convention on all things white and fluffy.
A cloud festival may sound bizarre, but cloudspotting is an ancient practice used by everyday folk to predict the weather. A ring of cloud around the moon gives a long-range forecast for bad weather. A red sky at either dusk or dawn provides a reading of the levels of moisture in the air, hence “red sky at night, shepherd’s delight”.
“People in the past were able to use the clouds to predict weather. It’s something the farmers are still good at but for the rest of us, it got lost somewhere and that’s what we are trying to rediscover,” says McKenna.
Observation and identification are the two main elements in cloudspotting. An understanding of the properties of cloud formation leads to a better knowledge of the atmosphere and that inspires closer connections to nature, according to McKenna.
“They are stunningly beautiful, when you begin to examine them. It’s something that is open to everyone and it’s becoming a popular pastime,” she says.
Headlining the Irish Cloud Festival is Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society in the UK, which has 27,000 subscribers. Pretor-Pinney's books, The Cloudspotter's Guideand The Cloud Collector's Handbook, became bestsellers in the UK and the US and sold 250,000 copies worldwide.
Complex and constantly changing atmospheric conditions give rise to 10 main cloud types that form at all levels where there is sufficient moisture to allow condensation to take place.
Pretor-Pinney is currently engaged in a bid to classify a new cloud type, which he calls "asperatus". Working with the Royal Meteorological Society, he is lobbying the World Meteorological Organisation in Geneva to recognise asperatus,which means "rough" in Latin. If he is successful, asperatus will be the first new cloud classification since 1951.
The festival begins on Wednesday with a cloudspotting session at the sprawling 200-acre Liss Ard Estate, on the outskirts of Skibbereen. All paths lead to the recently restored James Turrell Crater, the crown jewel of the estate’s Sky Garden. The crater rises 30m from a flat paddock to a dramatic oval rim measuring 50m long and 30m wide. A rectangular slate plinth set at the base provides the perfect cloud-gazing platform, with nothing else visible but clouds and sky.
“It’s an oval embankment, so it can be totally silent like a sound studio, with no wind or trees. I’ve seen people become genuinely emotional in there,” says Arthur Little, Liss Ard’s estate manager.
Far from childhood perceptions of comfy celestial plains, clouds can wreak havoc in the aerial regions traversed by planes. Colm Conyngham, a guest speaker at the festival, will tell of his terrifying ordeal on an Air France flight that plunged directly into a cumulonimbus cloud, the classic thunder cloud. Pilots normally divert to avoid such formations, the primary cause of turbulence on flights. Conyngham and his fellow passengers plummeted thousands of feet before the pilot regained control of the craft.
The Finglas-born stormchaser Ian Carruthers (21) of Irish Weather Online will share his breathtaking experiences of a 10-day trek across the southern US, while photographer John Baylis Post will advise on photographing of clouds.
A lunch of local produce will precede the Irish Cloud Festival at the West Cork Hotel, Skibbereen on Wednesday at 3pm. Tickets cost €35 for the full day, €25 for the convention and €10 for the Liss Ard estate Sky Garden guided tour. See ticas.ie
