Howard divided clouds into three groups: stratus for the layered clouds, cumulus for the fluffy ones (the word means heaped in Latin) and cirrus (meaning curled) for the high, thin feathery formations that generally presage colder weather. To these he subsequently added a fourth term, nimbus (from the Latin for cloud), for a rain cloud. The beauty of Howard’s system was that the basic components could be freely recombined to describe every shape and size of passing cloud—stratocumulus, cirrostratus, cumulonimbus, and so on. It was an immediate hit, and not just in England. Goethe was so taken
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